
Glass _ 
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PRESENTED BY 






Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster 




Tolstoy, From a 
private photograph 
taken in 1902. 



Drawn by F. Anger, 



TOLSTOY AS A 
SCHOOLMASTER 



By \V>^ 

ERNEST CROSBY 

Author of "Tolstoy and His 
Message," "Plain Talk in 
Psalm and Parable," "Swords 
and Ploughshares," etc. 



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Author 
(Person) 







CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I PAGE 

The School of Yasnaia Poliana 7 



i 



i 



CHAPTER II 
Fights at School io 

CHAPTER III 
Punishment 13 

CHAPTER IV 
Story-Telling 17 

CHAPTER V 
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity 19 

CHAPTER VI 
Methods of Instruction 23 

CHAPTER VII 
Recitations and Examinations 31 

CHAPTER VIII 
History 36 



6 Contents 

CHAPTER IX page 

Other Classes 24 

CHAPTER X 
Tolstoy's Later Views 46 

CHAPTER XI 

An American Experiment 52 

CHAPTER XII 
Tolstoy at Home .65 

CHAPTER XIII 
A Chapter on Penology 72 

CHAPTER XIV 
True and False Education 84 



CHAPTER I 

THE SCHOOL AT YASNAIA POLIANA 

Among the literary projects which Count Tolstoy 
is said to have on his hands is a book on education. 
It is to be hoped that he may be able to write it, as 
the subject is one in which he has been interested 
for the past forty years ; and it was as a school- 
master in his native village as long ago as 1862 
that he first gave signs of many of his present 
ideas on government and society. 

The serfs had just been freed, and, as a good 
landlord, Tolstoy set to work at the education of 
the peasant children so that they might be fitted 
for their newly acquired freedom. He established 
a school with three or four teachers beside himself. 
There were in all about forty pupils, including half 
a dozen girls. 

Not satisfied with this form of activity, Tolstoy 
edited an educational journal, in which he gave the 
results of his experience for the benefit of those 
in other parts of Russia who were enlisted in the 
same enterprise. The articles in this periodical 
were doubtless intended to accomplish a temporary 
purpose and not as a permanent contribution to 
literature, but Tolstoy has such a faculty of throw- 
ing himself and his entire genius into everything 



8 XTolsto£ as a Scboolmaster 

that he does that his editorial work attracted wide 
attention, and I have in my library four volumes 
in French, published nearly thirty years after the 
journal was issued, and made up in great part of 
articles taken from it : (" L'Ecole de Yasnaia 
Poliana " ; " Le Progr&s et T Instruction Publique 
en Russie " ; " La Liberte dans l'Ecole " ; " Pour 
les Enfants." Albert Savine, Paris.) 

A two-storey stone house was selected for the 
school. A little bell, hung over the doorway, 
rang at eight o'clock every morning, and half an 
hour later the children appeared. No one was 
ever reproved for tardiness, and yet there was 
rarely an absentee at the opening of the exercises. 
The children had nothing to bring with them, 
neither book nor copy-book nor slate ; there were 
no lessons to prepare ; neither was there any 
obligation upon them to remember what they had 
learned the day before. The boy was not tortured 
with the expectation of an examination or recita- 
tion of any kind. " He brings only himself, his 
impressionable nature, and the certainty that the 
school will be as happy for him to-day as it was 
yesterday." He had not to think of the class until 
it commenced. No attempt whatever was made 
to enforce order, for " children should learn to 
keep order themselves." 

Here is a scene in Tolstoy's own words : 

" The teacher enters the class-room. On the 
floor is a pile of children, one upon another, scream- 
ing and bawling. ' You are smashing me ! ' or 
* Stop pulling my hair ! ' 

" A voice from the bottom of the heap calls the 
teacher by name ■ 



Ghe Scbool at l^asnafa jpoliana 9 

11 ' Peter Michailovitch, tell them to leave me 
alone ! ' 

11 ' Good morning, Peter Michailovitch/ shout 
the others, keeping up the tumult. 

11 The teacher goes to the cupboard, takes out 
the books and distributes them to those who have 
followed him. Those who are on top of the pile 
ask for theirs. Gradually the pile grows smaller, 
and at last those at the bottom come running for 
their books too. If one or two boys are left 
fighting each other on the floor, the others, now 
ready on the benches, book in hand, cry out to 
them : 

" ' Come, stop now. Why do you wait so long ? 
We can't hear anything.' 

" They sit wherever they please, on the benches, 
on the tables, on the window-sill, on the floor, or 
in an old armchair which has found its way into 
the room, no one knows how." 

The order is perfect, there is no whispering, 
pinching or laughing. The hours for lessons are 
most irregular. Sometimes a lesson which, should 
take one hour is prolonged for three hours, if the 
pupils are sufficiently interested. Sometimes the 
children cry out, " Not yet, not yet ! " when the 
teacher is about to close the class. The children 
are not obliged to come to school nor to remain 
there, nor are they required to pay attention while 
there. 

" To my mind," says Tolstoy, " this disorder 
on the surface is useful and necessary, however 
strange and irksome it may seem to the master. . . . 
In the first place, this disorder, or rather this free 
order, only appears frightful to us because we are 



io TTolstos as a Scboolmastet 

accustomed to an entirely different system, accord- 
ing to which we have been educated ourselves. 
Secondly, in this case, as in many others, the use 
of force is founded only upon an inconsiderate and 
disrespectful interpretation of human nature. It 
seems as if the disorder were gaining and growing 
from instant to instant, as if nothing could stop 
it but coercion, when, if we only wait a moment, 
we see the disorder (like a fire) go down of itself 
and produce an order much better and more stable 
than that which we should substitute for it." 

He insists that throughout the children should 
be treated as reasoning and reasonable beings, who 
will find out for themselves that order is necessary, 
but who resent forcible interference, independent of 
their own experience. 



jfigbts at Scbool n 



CHAPTER II 

FIGHTS AT SCHOOL 

Tolstoy does not believe in interfering in the 
fights of children. " The master throws himself 
between them to separate them," he says, " and 
the two enemies look at each other angrily. Unable 
to restrain themselves even in the presence of the 
master whom they fear, they end by grappling 
with each other more hotly than ever. How 
many times on the same day do I see Kirouschka, 
with set teeth, fall upon Taraska, seize him by the 
hair and throw him down ; it looks as if he wished 
to disfigure him and leave him for dead. But 
before a moment has passed, Taraska is already 
laughing under Kirouschka and turns the tables 
on him. In five minutes they are good friends 
again, sitting side by side. 

11 Not long ago two boys began fighting in a 
corner after school — one of them a remarkable 
mathematician of nine years or so, a pupil of the 
second class ; the other a little fellow with black 
eyes, close-cropped hair, intelligent but vindictive, 
named Kiska. Kiska seized the long hair of the 
mathematician and pushed his head against the 
wall, while the latter tried in vain to catch hold 
of the shorn locks of his assailant. Kiska's black 
eyes glistened with triumph, and the mathematician 
could hardly keep back his tears. 

" ' Well, well ! What is it ? What is it ? 
What is it ? ' he said, but you could easily see that 



12 Uoistos as a Schoolmaster 

it was hurting him, and that he was only trying to 
appear brave. This lasted for some time, and I 
was in doubt as to what to do. 

" ' They are fighting ! They are fighting ! * 
the children cried, and they crowded into the 
corner. The little ones laughed, but the big 
boys, although they did not try to separate the 
combatants, looked at them with a serious ex- 
pression. Kiska noticed their looks and the 
silence. He understood that what he was doing 
was not right. He began to smile, and gradually 
let go the hair of the mathematician. The latter 
freed himself, smashed Kiska against the wall, and 
then went off quite satisfied. The little fellow 
began to cry and rushed after his enemy, hitting 
him with all his might on the coat but without 
hurting him. The mathematician was about to hit 
back, when cries of disapproval rang out. 

" ' Look, he is hitting a little boy ! ' shouted the 
spectators. ' Run away, Kiska ! ' 

" The matter ended there without leaving a 
trace, except probably the dim idea in the minds 
of both lads that fighting is disagreeable. In this 
case the sentiment of justice was aroused by the 
crowd, but how often such affairs are ended, by 
virtue of some unknown laws, to the dissatisfaction 
of both parties ! How arbitrary and unjust in 
comparison are all the remedies employed in such 
cases ! 

" c You are both to blame ; on your knees ! ' 
says the teacher. 

" And he is wrong, for there is only one of them 
to blame, who triumphs as he kneels down, gloating 
over his badness, while the innocent one is doubly 
punished. 



jFfgbts at Scbool 13 

" Or : - You are to blame for doing this or that, 
and you shall be punished ! ' says the teacher ; 
and the punished child will only hate his enemy 
the more, feeling as he does a despotic power at his 
side whose legitimacy he does not recognize. 

" Or : ' Forgive him, God wishes it so, and be 
better than he is/ says the teacher. 

" You tell him to be ' better than he is/ but he 
wishes only to be stronger ; better, — he does not 
understand what it means. 

" Or : ' You are both to blame ; ask each 
other's pardon and kiss each other, my children.' 

" This is the worst of all, for the kiss will not be 
sincere, and the bad feeling, stilled for a moment, 
may awake again. 

fi Leave them alone then, unless you are the 
father or the mother, who, full of pity for their son, 
always assume the right to pull the hair of whoever 
beats him. Leave them alone and see how every- 
thing arranges itself, calms itself, simply and 
naturally. 1 ' 

Tolstoy has given as much space to the account 
of the fight between Kiska and the mathematician 
as Homer devotes to a combat of heroes. Simple 
as the story is, it possesses, even after being trans- 
lated into French and from French into English, 
all the realism which distinguishes his great novels. 
Before such a boys' fight well may the teacher 
feel the same hesitation that Tolstoy experienced, 
and it is worthy of consideration whether the 
natural termination of such encounters is not 
usually more salutary than the interference of a 
deus ex machina, who, in inflicting punishment and 
reproof, often exhibits a spirit worse than that of 
either of the pugilists. 



i4 Uolstos as a Schoolmaster 

CHAPTER III 

PUNISHMENT 

While disapproving altogether of punishment, 
Tolstoy admits that the habit of punishing was 
so ingrained in him and his associates that they 
indulged in it once or twice, but the result was to 
confirm him in the opinion that it was a mistake. 

He gives one instance. A Leyden jar dis- 
appeared from the laboratory. Pencils and books 
began to vanish. The best boys in the school 
blushed and stammered when questioned about 
it as if they had been guilty, but it was only the 
idea of being suspected that affected them thus. 
At last the culprits were discovered ; two boys 
from a neighbouring village, who had hidden their 
booty in a small box. The disclosure gave great 
satisfaction to the school, removing suspicion, as it 
did, from the other pupils. 

It was decided to submit the question of the 
kind of punishment to the boys. Some suggested 
whipping, and asked to be permitted to do the 
whipping themselves. Others advised placing a 
placard bearing the word " thief " on each of the 
guilty pair. The latter course was adopted, and 
a little girl was called in to sew the obnoxious word 
upon their coats. The rest of the boys looked on 
with malicious glee, mocking at the two trans- 
gressors, and begged that they might be led through 
the village and carry the placard until the^next 
holiday. 

The two boys cried bitterly, and one of them 
cast wicked and savage glances at his exulting 



puntsbment is 

comrades. As he went home, with his head bent 
down and eyes on the ground, and, as it seemed 
to Tolstoy, with the gait of a criminal, the children 
followed in a crowd and tormented him so cruelly 
and unnaturally that they appeared to be possessed 
by a devil. 

From that time forth Tolstoy noticed that this 
boy became less studious, and ceased to take part 
in the games of the other boys. Not long after he 
stole again, this time some coppers from one of the 
masters. Once more the placard was fastened 
upon him, and the same brutal scenes were re- 
enacted. " I lectured him," says Tolstoy, " as 
schoolmasters are wont. A big boy who stood by 
began to lecture him, too, repeating phrases which 
he had undoubtedly heard from his father, a janitor : 

11 ' He has stolen once, he has stolen twice/ said 
he, sententiously. ' He will get into the habit of 
stealing. What will not the love of gain push him 
to?' 

" This annoyed me. I was irritated with the 
young prig. I looked at the face of the accused. 
As I saw him, paler, sadder, more untamed 
than before, I thought of felons in prison, I don't 
know why, and I tore the placard from his clothes 
and told him to go where he pleased, for I suddenly 
became conscious that the whole thing was wrong. 
I felt all at once, not in my intellect, but through 
my whole being, that I had no right to torture this 
poor child, and that I could not mould him as we 
wished to — I and the janitor's son. I felt that 
there are secrets of the soul which we cannot pierce 
and which life alone can change, and not re- 
proaches and punishments. 

" How stupid it all is ! The child has stolen a 



1 6 TToIstos as a Schoolmaster 

book ; by a long and complicated series of ideas, 
thoughts and false arguments, he has been led to 
take a book ; he does not know why he has shut 
it up in his box — and I fasten a placard upon him 
with the word * thief ' on it, which means quite a 
different thing. What good will it do ? Punish 
him by shame, you will say. Punish him 
by shame ? To what end ? Do we know 
that shame destroys the inclination to steal ? 
Perhaps, on the contrary, it stimulates it. Perhaps 
it was not shame that was expressed on his face. 
Indeed, I am quite sure that it was not shame, but 
something else which might have slept for ever in 
his soul and which ought not to have been aroused. 

" In the world which calls itself practical, the 
world of the Palmerstons and Cains, 1 the world 
which holds for reasonable not that which is 
reasonable but that which is practical — there, in 
that world, let the people arrogate to themselves 
the right of duty and punishing. But our world 
of children, of beings simple and frank, should be 
kept free from falsehood and from this criminal 
belief in the propriety of chastisement, from this 
theory that vengeance is just, as soon as we call it 
punishment/' 

It remains for other teachers to verify in their 

experience this deduction which Tolstoy has 

drawn from his. In the case which he cites he 

believes that the punishment inflicted had no 

tendency to correct the boy, but made him clearly 

worse than he had been, and at the same time 

stirred up the evil passions and latent meanness 

of the rest of the school. 

1 It should be remembered that Tolstoy wrote this in 
the early sixties. 




StotnMTelling 17 



CHAPTER IV 
STORY-TELLING 

In the afternoon about dusk — the early dusk of a 
Russian winter — the school came together again, 
and all the classes united, usually for the lesson in 
history, either sacred history or the history of 
Russia. The evening lessons, and especially this 
first one, were distinguished from those in the 
morning, says Count Tolstoy, by a particular note 
of serenity and poetry. He gives us a picture of 
this evening class, which I shall paraphrase and 
abbreviate : 

Come to the school in the twilight ; there is no 
light in the windows ; all is peaceful. The snow 
on the stairs, a faint murmur, a slight movement 
behind the door, a boy running upstairs two steps 
at a time : these are the only indications that the 
school is in session. Enter the class-room. It is 
almost dark behind the frosty panes. The older 
boys and the best scholars are pushed forward by 
their comrades close to the teacher, and lifting 
their little heads, hold their eyes fixed upon his 
lips. One little girl, perched on a high table, with a 
preoccupied expression of face, looks as if she were 
swallowing each word. Somewhat farther back 
are seated the less diligent pupils, and behind them 
the smallest boys of all. These little fellows listen, 
attentive and even with knit brows, in the same 
attitude as the big boys, but notwithstanding their 
attention, we know that they will not be able to 

B 



18 TToIstos as a Schoolmaster 

recite anything, although a good deal will stick 
in their memories. Some are leaning on the 
shoulders of their neighbours, some are standing 
behind tables. Occasionally one of them, making 
his way behind another, amuses himself by drawing 
figures on his back with his finger. 

They listen to a new story as if petrified. When 
it is repeated they cannot refrain from showing 
their knowledge by prompting the master. But 
an old familiar tale they insist on having recited 
accurately word for word, and they permit no 
interruption. If they notice an omission, they 
finish the story themselves. 

It seems as if all were dead ; nothing moves. Are 
they not asleep ? You advance in the shadow, 
and examine the face of one of the smaller boys. 
He is sitting, devouring the teacher with his eyes, 
and his intense attention makes him frown. For 
the tenth time he pushes from his shoulder the 
arm of a boy who is leaning on him. You tickle 
his neck, he does not even smile, he shakes his 
head as if to drive away a fly. He is entirely 
absorbed in the mysterious story of how the veil 
of the temple was rent in twain and the sky 
darkened. It is at once painful and sweet to him. 

Now the teacher has finished. All jump up and 
crowd round him, trying, each one louder than 
his neighbour, to repeat what they have remem- 
bered. The master attempts to stop them by 
assuring them that he knows that they have re- 
membered it all. It is of no use. They go to the 
other master, or if he is not there, to a schoolfellow, 
or a stranger, or even to the caretaker, begging him 
to listen to them. It is a rare thing for one of 



Storytelling 19 

them to repeat it alone. They gather in groups, 
each one seeking his equals in intelligence, and 
thus they recite, encouraging, questioning and 
correcting each other. At last they have ex- 
hausted the subject and gradually become calm. 
Candles are brought in, and they take up the next 
lesson. 

Throughout the evening there is less noise and 
disturbance than in the morning, and more obedi- 
ence and docility. We note a special dislike at 
this time for mathematics and analysis and a 
passion for singing, reading and especially story- 
telling. By eight o'clock their eyes begin to 
grow dim, they yawn frequently, the candles burn 
less brightly and have to be often snuffed. The 
older boys still hold out, but the younger boys and 
the stupider ones begin to drop off asleep with 
their elbows on the table, to the vague accom- 
paniment of the master's voice. 



20 Uolstos as a Scboolmaster 



CHAPTER V 

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY 

One of the peculiarities of Tolstoy's village school 
was that if the children wanted to go home at any 
time they were allowed to do so. He gives a 
dramatic account of one [ of these occasions, which 
I shall reproduce as far as possible/in his own words. 

Sometimes the children got tired by the second 
or third class after dinner. Suddenly two or three 
boys rush for their caps. 

" Where are you going ? " 

" Home." 

" But how about the other lessons ? " 

" The boys have said, ' Let's go home,' answers 
one of them, slipping out of the door with his cap." 

" But who said that ? " 

" See, they have gone." 

" But how is that ? " asks the master, thoroughly 
annoyed now, while he is preparing for the next 
class. " You had better stay, anyhow." 

Another boy rushes into the room with face 
animated and an embarrassed air. 

" What are you waiting for ? " says he roughly 
to the boy who has been told to stay, and who is 
standing hesitatingly, twisting his cap in his 
hands. 

" Look where the fellows are already ! They 
have passed the blacksmith's." 



liberty, Equality, fraternity 21 

And both the boys rush out, crying " Good 
bye " to the teacher. 

And who are the boys who decided to go home ? 
What put it into their heads ? No one knows. 
They did not deliberate or conspire, and yet they 
have gone. 

11 The children are going home i " No sooner 
is this cry raised than little feet are heard on the 
stairs, and the youngsters, falling over each other 
in the snow, jumping like cats, racing one with 
another, set off for the village. 

These scenes occur once or twice a week. They 
are rather mortifying to the master, but he sub- 
mits to them because they give a deeper meaning 
to the five, six or even seven classes, voluntarily 
attended each day by the pupils. The desire to 
learn is strong enough in children to make them 
undergo many vexations in order to satisfy it. 

The subject of truancy does not seem to have 
come up in Count Tolstoy's school. Perhaps if 
attendance at school were presented to children 
not as a duty, but as a privilege, they might prize 
it more highly, and if it were known that they 
could go home when they liked, the very sense of 
freedom would make them want to stay. It would 
bring into play not the authority, but the attraction 
of the teacher. 

Out of school hours the greatest friendliness 
existed between Count Tolstoy and his pupils. 
The regular session lasted until half-past eight 
in the evening, the last hours being devoted to 
singing, reading and experiments in physics, 
magnetism, etc., these experiments giving the 
greatest satisfaction to the boys. After school 



22 TTolstos as a Schoolmaster 

Tolstoy would often take a walk with them in the 
snow, sometimes going to the edge of the woods 
where the danger of wolves forbade further wander- 
ing. He would tell them stories and lead them 
into the^ discussion of the deepest questions, in 
which these peasant boys showed as much intel- 
ligence as the most learned and educated men. 

" What is the use of drawing ? " asked a bright 
lad on one of these walks. " What is the use of 
art ? " 

Tolstoy did not know what to answer. 

" What is the use of a stick ? What is the 
use of a plane tree ? " answered Semka, one of the 
boys, striking a plane tree with his stick. 

" Yes, what is the use of a plane tree in summer 
before it is cut down ? M 

And they come naturally to consider the pro- 
found questions of the relations of beauty to use- 
fulness, concluding that the beauty of the tree is 
sufficient excuse for it. One of the boys regrets 
that the tree has to be cut down, because it is a liv- 
ing thing. " The sap is just like blood," he says. 

For a long time they walk on, talking thus 
seriously, one of the boys holding the Count's 
hand affectionately. 

Tolstoy is indignant at the suggestion that it 
is a mistake to allow the minds of peasants to 
develop " beyond their station." " Who will do 
the hard work," some people ask, " when every- 
body is either an artist or a philosopher ? " The 
mind of the peasant is naturally like the mind of 
the landed proprietor, and one is equally entitled 
with the other to have its craving for knowledge 
and mental exercise gratified. 



dfcetbo&s of instruction 23 

CHAPTER VI 

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION 

Tuition at the school of Yasnaia Poliana was of 
course free. There were about forty pupils in all, 
but usually not more than thirty were present at 
a time, of whom four or five were girls. The ages 
of the boys varied from seven to thirteen years, 
with an occasional adult who wished to make up 
for the lack of opportunity to study during his 
boyhood. There were four teachers in all, and 
six or seven lessons a day. Tolstoy used the 
school as a laboratory for experiments. He has 
the habit of mind of questioning all traditions and 
customs in all realms of thought and activity, and 
of making them answer for themselves, and he 
carried it with him into the field of education. 

It is a disturbing habit, and perhaps it is just 
as well that all men do not indulge in it ; but it is 
stimulating to find here and there a man who 
insists on thinking for himself, and who refuses 
to accept without proof the most time-honoured 
theories. Count Tolstoy soon came to the con- 
clusion, as we have seen, that it is fatal to consider 
the school as a disciplined company of soldiers, all 
obeying the same orders in the same way. A 
certain degree of freedom, of disorder even, he 
found necessary for the purpose of revealing the 
individuality of each pupil. He compared his 
own method of teaching with that of the village 
sacristan, and as a result of the comparison for- 



24 Tolstoi? as a Scboolmaster 

mulated three rules, namely, that (i) The teacher 
always has a tendency to select that method of 
teaching which is easiest for him ; (2) that the 
easier it is for him, the less satisfactory it is for his 
pupils ; and (3) that method only is good which 
gives satisfaction to the pupils. And to give 
satisfaction to the pupils it is necessary to take 
account of the differences between them and of 
their natural aptitudes. 

Tohtoy found the old-fashioned school curri- 
culum based upon the study of grammar, and this 
study appeared to him particularly senseless. 
The object of learning grammatical rules is to 
speak the language correctly, but it is obviously 
possible to speak correctly without knowing the 
rules, and hence the value of learning them con- 
sists chiefly in the mental exercise, which can be 
obtained as easily in some other more useful way. 
fc He found practice in composition much the 
best way of studying language. In the first and 
second classes the choice of subjects was left to 
the pupils, who usually preferred stories from the 
Old Testament, which they wrote out two months 
after they had heard them from the master. In 
the second class they tried compositions on given 
subjects, such as " wheat," "houses," "wood," 
but to their surprise these subjects drove the boys 
to tears, and even when the master helped them, 
and called their attention to the growing of the 
grain of wheat, its transformations and uses, they 
still worked reluctantly, and made all sorts of 
mistakes in spelling, grammar and meaning. Then 
Tolstoy changed his method and narrated some 
event to them, and they were at once delighted, 



flfeetbo&s of Jnstruction 25 

and they found it much easier to recite an incident 
which they remembered than to describe a pig or 
a pot or a table. To the master these simple 
subjects seemed the easiest, but the child, as usual, 
looked at things from the opposite point of view, 
and was interested only in that which is complex 
and living. 

Text-books, says Tolstoy, usually begin with 
general ideas, those of grammar with adjectives, 
those of history with divisions into periods, those of 
geometry with definition of space and of the mathe- 
matical point ; but these general ideas are the 
hardest to comprehend, and the child must begin 
with something tangible, related to his own 
common experiences. To describe a table re- 
quires a high degree of philosophical attainment, 
and the child who cries because he has to write 
about a chair, will express well a feeling of love 
or hate — either the meeting of Joseph with his 
brethren or a quarrel of his own with his com- 
rades. 

The subjects which the children chose were 
either some particular event, their relations with 
some particular person, or tales that they had 
heard. They preferred writing compositions to 
any other exercise. Out of school, as soon as they 
chanced upon paper and pencil, they began to 
write stories. And they soon became critics as 
well, vexed when the story of a fellow-pupil was 
too long, or disconnected, or when there were too 
many repetitions. They had definite tastes of 
their own. Sometimes a boy would refuse to 
read his essay, declaring that that of another boy 
was better than his, and soon, when the composi- 



26 xrolstop as a Scboolmaster 

tions were read anonymously, the boys would 
easily guess who the author was. 

Tolstoy gives two specimens of composition by 
Fedka, a boy of ten, to show how much more easily 
he described a trip to Toula than a concrete object. 
Here is his essay on " Wheat." 

" The grain germinates in the ground. First it 
is green, but when it has grown a little it produces 
ears and the women reap it. There is also a kind 
of wheat like grass which the cattle eat." 

And this was all he could find to write on the 
subject. He saw that the composition was a poor 
one, and was much distressed about it, but he could 
not improve it. Here is his essay on " Toula." 

"When I was still a little fellow, about five 
years old, I used to hear people speak of going to 
Toula, but I did not know what it was. And 
so I asked father, ' Father, to what Toula do you 
go ? Is it pretty ? ' Father said, ' Yes/ And 
I said, ' Take me with you, father, so that I may 
see Toula/ Father said, ' All right. Come on 
Sunday and Til take you.' I was delighted, and 
began to run and jump on the bench. The days 
passed and Sunday arrived. I got up early, and 
father was already harnessing the horses in the 
farmyard, and I dressed myself as quickly as I 
could. When I came out, the horses were already 
harnessed. I got into the sleigh, and we left. 

" We go on and on until we have gone fourteen 
versts. I see a big church, and I cry out, ' Father, 
see what a big church/ Father answered, ' There 
is another smaller church, which is smaller but 
prettier/ I begin to beg him, ' Father, let's go 
there to church/ Father takes me there. As we 



flDetbo&s of Jnstruction 27 

arrive, they begin ringing the bells. I am afraid, 
and ask father what it is, if it is a drum and trum- 
pet. Father says, ' No, it is the mass that is 
beginning.' Then we go into the church to say 
our prayers. When that is done, we go to the 
market, and I walk and walk and trip up, and 
look everywhere. We reach the market, and I 
see they are selling kalatchi (rolls of bread), and I 
want to take some without paying. And father 
says to me, ' Don't take any, or they will take your 
hat/ I ask why they would take it, and father 
says, ' Take nothing without paying/ I say, 
1 Give me ten kopeks and I'll buy a kalatch/ 
Father gives me some. I buy three kalatchi. I 
eat them and say, ' Father, what good kalatchi/ 
When we have bought all that we have to, we 
return to our horses, give them a drink and some 
hay. When they have finished eating, we harness 
them and go back home. I go into the house and 
undress, and I begin to tell everybody that I had 
been at Toula, and how father and I had gone to 
church to pray to God. Then I go to sleep, and 
in my dream I see father leave for Toula again. 
I wake up quickly and see that all are sleeping, 
and then I go to sleep again too." 

Tolstoy's estimate of the artistic capabilities 
of the peasant children in the way of authorship 
may seem a little exaggerated, but he publishes 
the results and invites the assent of the public to 
his belief. He printed some of the stories which 
they composed in his educational journal, and also 
one composed by a master, and he insists that the 
last was the worst of them all. He had some 
difficulty in inducing the boys to write, but when 



28 XToIstoy as a Scboolmaster 

finally he sat down among them and they all set 
to work to compose a story based on some simple 
theme which he would outline in a few words, 
before long they would stop writing and crowd 
round him looking over his shoulder, and then he 
would let them take the story out of his hands, 
accepting every suggestion from them and acting 
merely as amanuensis with a certain right of 
selection. 

The first page of this story was Tolstoy's own, 
the rest was almost wholly the boys', and he de- 
clares that " every unprejudiced man, however 
little he may care for art or the people, after having 
read the first page written by me and the following 
pages written by the pupils themselves, will dis- 
tinguish it readily from the rest like a fly in a glass 
of milk, so poor, so artificial and in such a bad 
style is it written. I should say that originally 
it was even worse, and I corrected it a great deal 
upon hints from the scholars." It was on this 
occasion that he discovered the ability of Fedka, 
and he was especially struck by his sense of pro- 
portion, " the principal condition of all art." 
They worked together for four hours, from seven 
to eleven in the evening, and the other boys 
dropped out, except Fedka and one of his com- 
panions, Semka by name. 

" Will it really be printed ? " asked Fedka. 

" Yes." 

" Then you must say it is by Makaroff, Morosoff 
and Tolstoy." Tolstoy does not hesitate to place 
Fedka above Goethe, and as for himself, u far from 
being able to guide or help Semka, a child of eleven, 
and Fedka, I should consider myself happy (and 



/IDetbctos of Jnstcuctfon 29 

only during a happy moment of excitement) to 
understand and follow them ! " 

Unfortunately this particular story, so far as I 
know, has not been translated into English, 
French or German, and the extracts which Count 
Tolstoy gives in his Pour Les Enfants imply a 
knowledge of the story, and are consequently not 
illuminative. He gives more of a story of Fedka's, 
however, describing the unexpected return of a 
soldier to his family, in the days when enlistment 
meant usually banishment from home for life. 
This theme was also suggested by Tolstoy. 

The first chapter is inferior, he declares, be- 
cause he, Tolstoy, interfered with its authorship. 
The end of the story, which gives an account of 
the actual return of the father to his family, 
Tolstoy thinks superior to anything in Russian 
literature. It depicts the delight of the boy at 
seeing his father. He sits next to him at table 
so that he may touch him. The father goes out, 
and the boy wishes to follow him, but his mother 
forbids it, and when he persists she gives him a 
slap. He begins to cry, and climbs up on top of 
the brick oven, the Russian's favourite rest- 
ing place. The father comes in again, and 
asks — 

" ' Why are you crying ? ' 

"I complain of my mother. He goes up to her 
and pretends to slap her, saying — 

" ' Never slap Fedoushka again ! Never slap 
Fedoushka again ! ' 

" And mother makes belief to cry. ,, * 

This is certainly a pretty scene/ but I must leave 
it to others better qualified to determine its rank 



3° ftolstos as a Schoolmaster 

in Russian literature, and in comparison with the 
works of Goethe and Tolstoy. 

While Fedka and Semka were the best artists 
of the school, Tolstoy discovered the same talents, 
only in lesser degree, in the other boys. " A 
healthy child/' he says, " when he comes into the 
world, realizes completely the absolute harmony 
with the true, the beautiful, and the good which 
we carry in us ; he is still in touch with inanimate 
things, with plant and animal life, with that nature 
which personifies in our eyes that true, beautiful 
and good which we seek and long for. . . . But 
every hour of life, every minute of time, disturbs 
more and more those relations which, when he 
was born, were in a perfectly harmonious equili- 
brium, and every step, every hour, violates this 
harmony.'' 

"Education perverts a child, it cannot correct 
him. The more he is perverted, the less must we 
educate him, and the more does he need freedom. 
To teach, to bring up a child, why, it is a chimera, 
an absurdity, for this simple reason, that the child 
is much nearer than I am, or any grown man, to 
the true, beautiful and good to which I undertake 
to raise him. The consciousness of this ideal lives 
in him more intensely than in me, and all that he 
requires of me is the material with which to per- 
fect himself harmoniously in all directions." 



IRecitatfons atto Examinations 31 



CHAPTER VII 
RECITATIONS AND EXAMINATIONS 

Bible history and Russian history were both 
taught in the Yasnaia school. The teacher reads 
or tells his story from memory and then asks 
questions, to which the children answer all toge- 
ther. If this produces too much disorder, he puts 
the question to a single pupil, and if he cannot 
answer, the rest help him out. This system was 
the gradual growth of experience, and it worked 
very well whether there were thirty children pre- 
sent or only five. The master does not allow the 
noise to become overwhelming, but guides, so far 
as it may be necessary, the torrent of happy 
animation and excited rivalry. 

A new master was shocked by the uproar, and 
almost suffocated by the crowd of children climb- 
ing over his back and on his lap, and he put a stop 
to it, but by so doing he completely spoiled the 
class. To enable them to understand, says Tol- 
stoy, children need to come close to those who are 
talking, and to seize the slightest change of face 
and of gesture. The new master made them sit 
on benches and answer each in turn. The boy 
who was questioned stammered, ashamed and 
confused, and the teacher, with a kindly expres- 
sion and a smile, encouraged him by saying — 

" Well, then . . . and after that ? . . . good, 
very good," as is the wont of schoolmaster . 



32 TToisto? as a Scfooolmaster 

But Tolstoy soon became convinced that nothing 
was worse for a child than to have to answer alone 
in this way, and nothing more harmful than the 
relations of superior and subordinate which it 
produced between master and pupil. " Nothing 
is more revolting to me," he says, " than this 
spectacle of a man who torments a child without 
having the slightest right to do it. The teacher 
knows well enough that the pupil is suffering from 
having to stand blushing and perspiring before 
him, and he finds it disagreeable himself, but 
he has a rule — a pupil must learn to speak 
alone." 

But why must he learn to recite alone ? " No- 
body knows," unless indeed it is to be able to show 
off before visitors. And visitors Tolstoy regards 
as thorough-going nuisances. They had only one 
effect upon him, and that was to satisfy him that 
set exercises and answers and examinations were 
relics of the superstitions of the Middle Ages. 
Either they went away convinced that the scholars 
knew what they did not know, and the teacher had 
succeeded in fooling them, or else they thought 
that they did not know what they knew perfectly 
well. It would be as sensible, he claims, to ex- 
amine a man of forty in his knowledge of geo- 
graphy as to examine a man of ten. You have to 
live for months with a person to find out what he 
knows. And where examinations are made a 
feature of education they become an end in them- 
selves, and the student no longer really learns 
philosophy or history, but he learns the altogether 
distinct art of answering examination questions, 
a totally useless branch of study. 



IRecftatfons an& Examinations 33 

Tolstoy made the experiment in history of 
questioning the class separately. Most of them 
soon tired of this. The boldest alone went on 
answering, and the timid ones held their peace, 
burst into tears, and were marked zero. The new 
teacher was disgusted with the results, and noted 
in his class-book that this, that, and the other boy 
were stupid and worse. " I cannot get a word 
out of Savine," he entered. 

Savine was a rosy-cheeked boy with soft eyes 
and long lashes, the son of a farm-hand. He 
wore a blouse and trousers and his father's boots. 
His pretty and attractive face struck Tolstoy at 
once, especially as he won the first place in the 
arithmetic class, both by his ability to calculate 
and by his merry enthusiasm. He also read and 
wrote fairly well. But as soon as he was ques- 
tioned, " he drops his head on one side, tears come 
to his eyes, and he evidently longs to sink through 
the floor.' ' It is a real martyrdom for him. " Is 
it the fear which his former teacher inspired in 
him (he had studied with a priest) ? Is it self- 
distrust, pride, his false position among children 
whom he considers inferior to himself, the dislike 
of seeing himself in this one matter behind all the 
rest, and of appearing at a disadvantage to his 
teacher ? Has this little soul been hurt by some 
unlucky word of the master ? Is it for all these 
reasons together ? God knows, but this shyness, 
even if of itself it is not a good trait, is certainly 
closely bound up with all that is best in his boyish 
soul. To obliterate it with the aid of a ruler — 
material or moral — you may do it, but at the risk 
of obliterating at the same time other precious 

c 



34 TTolstos as a Schoolmaster 

qualities without which you cannot lead him far 
on the right road." 

Tolstoy persuaded the new teacher to let the 
children desert the benches and climb where they 
pleased, and the class began at once to improve. 
And he soon saw entered in the journal some 
flattering remarks regarding the same Savine. 

Maeterlinck has spoken recently of the " spirit 
of the bee-hive.' ' Forty years ago Tolstoy wrote 
very much the same way of the " spirit of the 
school." " There is," he tells us, "in a school, 
something undefined, which is almost entirely 
independent of the master's control, something 
absolutely unknown to the science of pedagogy, 
and which constitutes notwithstanding the very 
foundation of success in teaching — it is the spirit 
of the school. The master has indeed a negative 
influence upon it, for unless he abstains from cer- 
tain things, he may destroy it. This spirit in- 
creases in proportion as the master allows the 
pupils to think for themselves, and with the 
number of pupils, and it decreases in proportion 
as the lessons and hours are lengthened. It com- 
municates itself from child to child and to the 
teacher himself, and shows itself in the sound of 
the voice, in looks, in gestures, in rivalries — 
something very palpable, necessary and precious, 
and which consequently every master ought to 
cherish. It is a spirit of ardour which is as neces- 
sary to intellectual nourishment as the saliva is 
to digestion. It cannot be artificially produced, 
but it springs into life of itself. It is the teacher's 
duty to find some useful object for this spirit to 
spend itself upon, and not to try to quench it. 



IRccftations an& Examinations 35 

You ask one boy a question, but another wishes 
to answer it. He bends towards you and looks 
at you with all his might. He can hardly keep 
back the words. Ask him, and he will answer 
with passion, and what he says will be fixed for 
ever on his memory. But if you keep him in that 
state of tension for half an hour without letting 
him overflow, he will let it out in pinching his 
neighbour." 

Tolstoy tested his classes in the following way. 
He would go out and leave the school to itself, 
after it had been going on for a time in the usual 
disorder. When he returned he would listen at 
the door and find the children still engaged at their 
studies, reciting to each other and correcting each 
other, more quietly than when he was there ; 
while in an old-fashioned school, if the teacher 
leaves, and orders the pupils to continue their 
studies alone, they will begin sky-larking as soon 
as he is out of hearing. The reaction is certain. 
A new pupil at the Yasnaia school was pretty sure 
to remain silent for a month or more, but gradually 
he began to recite with the rest and to take his 
natural place, absorbing what he heard. 



36 TTolstcn? as a Schoolmaster 



CHAPTER VIII 

HISTORY 

For the teaching of history Tolstoy regards the 
Bible as an incomparable book, and especially the 
Old Testament. It interested the children more 
than any other. " It seems to me," says Tolstoy 
somewhat profoundly, " that the book of the child- 
hood of the human race will always be the best 
book for the childhood of every man." He found 
it impossible to find a substitute for it, and all 
abridgements, and collections of Bible stories, 
were less valuable than the original. To his mind 
it is perfect art. It may be an improper book for 
" depraved young women," Tolstoy says, but he 
adds that he never altered a word in it when he 
read it to the peasants* children, and they never 
listened to it except with respect and interest. 
" How comprehensible and clear it all is, especially 
for a child, and serious and severe withal ! I 
cannot see how teaching would be possible without 
this book." 

The Bible seemed to lift the veil of a new and 
magical world which the pupils wished to enter, 
and it is the real function of the teacher to intro- 
duce his pupils into a new world of art and science. 
He must arouse their curiosity and their desire to 
follow him. And the Bible first awakened this 
curiosity, as nothing else could. The children 



lfofstor£ 37 

never had too much of it, and after hearing it from 
Tolstoy they were ready to follow him into Russian 
history and other fields, which before they had 
refused to enter. 

No other book presents in such a condensed 
poetical form all the aspects of human thought. 
The primitive relations of men among themselves, 
of family, society, religion, show themselves in its 
pages for the first time. It teaches wisdom under 
childlike forms and charms the mind of the child. 
" Materialism will have a right to claim the victory 
when it shall have written the Bible of materialism 
and children have been brought up on this Bible." 
And Tolstoy concludes that without the Bible in 
our society, as without Homer in the society of 
Greece, the development of the child and of the 
man would be impossible. 

The step from Bible history to other histories 
was not an easy one. The children showed no 
interest in Egypt or the Phoenicians. Before 
learning Bible history the children had absolutely 
refused to listen to Russian history. After a 
course of Bible history they submitted more grace- 
fully, but still they showed very little interest 
in the national annals. Tolstoy admits that the 
history of Russia is not an inspiring one. With the 
exception of the turning back of the French by 
11 Generals " January and February in 1812,'there is 
no event which is calculated to arouse enthusiasm, 
and those two generals lack the human qualities 
of flesh and blood. 

It is rather amusing to find Tolstoy, the sworn 
foe of patriotism, forty years ago recommending 
the patriotic method to teachers as the only way 



38 Xlolstos as a Scboolmaster 

to teach history. The first time he told the story 
of the retreat from Moscow remained a memorable 
occasion in his recollection. " I shall never forget 
it," he said. He had formed the idea of teaching 
history going backward from the present time. 
Another teacher had begun according to rule at 
the beginning, and the intention was eventually 
to meet in the middle. He went into the other 
class one day and found the children very weary 
of the subject which engaged them, and they 
begged him to tell them about something else. 
He sat down and began to explain the rise of 
Napoleon after the French Revolution. For sev- 
eral minutes there was a good deal of disorder, 
some of them climbing on to the table, some crept 
under it, and others under the benches, but finally 
all was quiet. He told them how Napoleon de- 
termined to subdue Russia. 

" What!" cried a boy. "He will conquer us 
too ? " 

" Don't be afraid," answered another, " Alex- 
ander will get even with him." 

They were much scandalized at the proposition 
of marrying a sister of the Tsar to Napoleon, and 
that the Tsar should treat him as an equal. 

" Let him wait a minute," cried Petka, with a 
threatening gesture. 

" Go on, go on ! " cried the rest. 

When Alexander refused to submit and declared 
war, all the pupils showed their approval, but when 
Napoleon, " with twelve nations," marched upon 
Russia, they were all much disturbed. A German 
friend of Count Tolstoy was in the schoolroom 
with him. 






ttrtstorg 39 

" Ah, you too are against us," cried Petka to 
him. 

" Keep quiet ! " cried the others. 

The retreat of the Russians pained them griev- 
ously, and they heaped reproaches upon the 
generals. 

" Your Koutouzov is a miserable specimen ! " 

" Wait a minute," said another. 

" But why did he retreat ? " asked a third. 

It was hard work for Tolstoy to tell them that 
the Russians lost the battle of Borodino. It was 
a terrible blow to the boys. 

" Anyhow, if we didn't win, they didn't either," 
they said. 

When Napoleon reached Moscow, expecting the 
keys of the city and the homage of the people, 
there was a long cry of revolt. They approved 
of the burning of Moscow, of course. Then came 
the triumph — the retreat. Tolstoy told them 
how the French left Moscow, and how Koutouzov 
pursued them and attacked them. 

11 He opened his eyes for him ! " cried Petka, 
quite red in the face, clenching his little fingers. 
A thrill of enthusiasm passed over the whole class, 
and a little boy was nearly crushed unnoticed. 

When the French began to freeze to death, there 
were some expressions of pity. Then, as the 
Germans begin to side with Russia, the pupils 
again turn upon Tolstoy's German friend. 

" Ah, that's the way you behave, is it ? At first 
against us, and then when you see we are winning, 
on our side ? " And the whole roomful saluted 
him with groans. 

The German visitor accused Tolstoy of telling 



40 ZTolstos as a Schoolmaster 

a one-sided story, and the latter was obliged to 
admit it. If he had explained Alexander's deceit- 
ful policy towards Prussia and his cruelty to 
Poland, the boys would not have listened for a 
moment. Hence he was obliged to compose a 
piece of fiction and call it history. And that is 
the real drawback in all attempts to teach a 
national history in schools. The authors of the 
text-books and the teachers as well are forced 
invariably to tell a string of lies — a practice which 
cannot be edifying. 

American history is indeed more inspiring than 
that of Russia. The immigration of the Pilgrim 
Fathers for religious freedom, the refusal to pay 
the unjust tax on tea, the abolition of slavery, all 
these great episodes give opportunities for high 
moral lessons, but no one uses them in that way. 
All the defects of the national heroes are concealed, 
the characters of our enemies are depicted in dark 
colours, and the stamp of falsehood is impressed 
upon the whole story. It is possible to rise to a 
plane of enthusiasm for humanity from which 
mere patriotism appears immoral. Possibly the 
average child cannot attain to this level, although 
I believe the effort of inviting him to it would be 
worth making, but surely he has enough patriot- 
ism by nature without our stimulating it, and 
especially by prevarication and unjust reflections 
upon other people's. 

If he is to learn the history of his country, let it 
be a true history, and let pains be taken to dis- 
suade him from hating and despising other nations. 
Let him learn that they too have their patriotisms, 
quite as reasonable and well-founded as his own. 



•flMstors 41 

And if he refuses to become interested in the truth, 
let him go without. And, in fact, how much his- 
tory have any of us retained from our school days ? 
I can only answer for myself. I could easily learn 
in a week from an Encyclopaedia all that I now 
remember of such instruction. And how much 
does the most learned scholar know of human 
history ? A mere infinitesimal particle of the 
whole. And is the knowledge of a mass of un- 
digested facts and of unrelated dates a real element 
of education ? I doubt it. 

Tolstoy came to the conclusion that the pupil's 
interest in history was entirely dramatic — that is, 
artistic. They enjoy the story of Romulus and 
Remus, not because they founded the greatest 
empire of the world, but because it is interesting 
and marvellous. They will not listen to an account 
of the migrations of peoples because there is no 
art in it. " Children like history only when it is 
vivified by art." They have no interest in history 
as such, and the phrase ' a child's history ' is an 
absurdity." 

Tolstoy's preference for the Bible as a book of 
the world's childhood suggests that good use of 
Greek, Roman, German and other mythologies 
might be made in place of more authentic histories, 
and as a matter of culture it is probably as well 
worth while to know the details of the siege of 
Troy as of the campaigns of Alexander the Great 
or of Charlemagne. The child has a natural taste 
for this wonder-world, and it can do no harm to 
gratify it. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales made 
a much deeper impression upon me than any of 
the histories which I studied. 



42 Uoistos as a Schoolmaster 



CHAPTER IX 
OTHER CLASSES 

Tolstoy had as much difficulty in teaching geo- 
graphy as in history. The children showed no 
interest at all in the fact that the earth revolves 
on its axis and passes round the sun. When he 
began to teach in which continents the various 
countries are, they saw no use for such informa- 
tion. Just as in history he tried to begin with 
their own time, he now made the experiment of 
teaching geography beginning at their own 
village. They took some interest in the next 
village, but they knew it already without study. 
The place beyond altogether failed to arouse their 
curiosity. They would listen to stories about 
different countries, provided always that there 
was no geography in them, but that was all. And 
when they found that the stories were intended 
to hoodwink them into learning geography, they 
resented the fraud and took a strong dislike to 
the class. 

Tolstoy concludes that the study of geography 
in schools is a mistake. He quotes with approval 
the saying of a character in a Russian comedy : 

" What's the good of learning all the countries ? 
The coachman will take you wherever you have 
to go." 



©tber Classes 43 

As a teacher he felt in himself a whole world of 
information regarding nature, art and poetry 
which he had no time to communicate to the chil- 
dren. There are thousands of questions about 
the life around us to answer before we begin to 
tell about the tropics and the polar regions. 
Children have no natural taste for geography, and 
the first thing to do, if it is to be studied, is to 
awaken that taste. Tolstoy suggests the reading 
of travels as a means to this end. I would be 
tempted to add, as even a more efficient awakener, 
the collecting of postage-stamps. The ordinary 
boy learns much more in this way than from the 
best of teachers. 

In his book, What is Art ? Tolstoy has fully ex- 
plained his belief that the poetry, music and 
painting of the day have grown up in a stifling 
atmosphere, and that they are degenerate pro- 
ducts. He had already formed these opinions 
in the days of the Yasnaia school. The children 
were bored by the best poetry, but they enjoyed 
the rude popular songs of the peasantry, and 
Tolstoy thinks that these latter exhibit the truer 
art. Hence it is natural that he should not have 
been altogether satisfied with the instruction 
which he gave to the boys in music and drawing, 
for from his own point of view, he should have 
been the pupil and they the teachers. He de- 
clares that the boys sang better when left to them- 
selves, before receiving lessons, than they did 
afterwards ; but it must be remembered that the 
Russians are a musical people, and possess a 
treasure of national song. 

In drawing he tried to give them all the freedom 






44 XToIsto^ as a Scboolmaster 

possible, and he points out that if they are made 
to copy and imitate at school they will go on 
merely copying and imitating all their lives. And 
in all things he would leave their own taste un- 
affected by the taste of the teacher, which he 
regards as necessarily vitiated. The child has 
the same right to its preferences which the master 
has, and his taste is less likely to be warped and 
distorted. 

It must not be supposed that Tolstoy reached 
his views on education without studying fully the 
methods in vogue in Europe. He visited the 
schools of Germany, France and Switzerland, and 
questioned teachers and pupils with the object of 
learning all that could be learned from them. 
He made a special study of this kind at Marseilles 
(this was in the early sixties, I think), and was 
soon satisfied that the schools of that city were of 
very little use. Yet he found the inhabitants of 
Marseilles particularly intelligent, clever and 
civilized. What was the explanation ? It was 
this. They had obtained their education outside 
of the schools, in the streets, the cafes, theatres, 
workshops and museums, and by reading such 
books as the novels of Dumas. This is the natural 
school, he says, which has undermined the arti- 
ficial school, and has left hardly anything of it 
except its despotic form. 

He infers that the more a people advances, the 
more does true education desert the school for the 
region of real life outside. And the effort of a 
school which wishes to adapt itself to this progress 
should be to answer the questions suggested by 
the home life of the pupil, for it is in his home and 



©tber Classes 45 

among his neighbours that he is brought face to 
face with life. The prevailing education of the 
day Tolstoy condemns as moral despotism, the 
determination of one individual to make another 
individual exactly like himself, and this he declares 
to be an un justifiable invasion of the rights of the 
individual. We have no ethical right to do it. 

He draws an amusing contrast between a child 
while suffering from this kind of education at 
school, " anxious, repressed, with an expression 
of weariness, fear and listlessness, repeating 
mechanically strange words in a strange language, 
a creature whose soul has retired like a snail into 
its shell," and the same child in the street or at 
home, " enjoying life, wishing to learn, a smile on 
his face, seeking to develop in every way, and ex- 
pressing his ideas clearly when he speaks.' ' 

Fifteen years after his experiments in school- 
teaching Tolstoy sums up his deductions in an 
essay on " Public Instruction/' The sole basis of 
education, he asserts, is freedom — the freedom of 
the people to organize their own schools, and of 
the pupil to make up his own mind as to what he 
will learn and how he will learn it. And experi- 
ence alone can point out the best method by 
indicating the most natural rapport between 
teacher and scholars. In each concrete case the 
actual degree of liberty will depend upon the 
master's talents and sympathy, but he insists upon 
the general principle that the less the restraint 
the better the school. 



46 Uolsto» as a Schoolmaster 



CHAPTER X 

TOLSTOY'S LATER VIEWS 

It is easy to see that in 1862 Tolstoy held, in germ 
at least, most of the views which have since made 
him distinguished as a radical thinker. Absolute 
freedom is his ideal, and he would apply it to chil- 
dren almost as fully as to men. In a private letter 
published recently, he gives some hints of his 
present ideas on education. He would have the 
teachers fix the hours of school, but leave the pupils 
at liberty to come or not as they please. Where 
school is made attractive this system would have 
little effect upon attendance. " That the pupils 
should come to learn of their own accord, when 
they desire it, is a conditio sine qua non of all fruit- 
ful teaching, just as in feeding it is a conditio sine 
qua non that the eater should be hungry." For 
truancy, I presume he would hold the teacher 
responsible rather than the scholar, for the teacher 
should have made the school more delightful. 

Freedom is necessary for many reasons. The 
brighter pupils must be free to push ahead of the 
duller ones. Only in freedom can you find out 
what subjects the child is ready to assimilate, and 
what his special aptitudes may be. If freedom 
is denied the pupil at school, how can he be taught 
that it is desirable in after-life ? If he is accus- 



Uolstos'a Xater Dlews 47 

tomed to coercion during his education, he will 
regard it as a great and necessary feature of life. 
The thing to do is to teach the children what they 
desire to learn. 

" The very little ones, if they are normally 
brought up, will themselves ask for lessons and 
insist on regularity . . . yesterday there was a 
lesson after dinner, and to-day they desire one after 
dinner." He thinks that half of the sixteen waking 
hours should be devoted to " education " — that 
is, to enlightenment, with intervals of rest and 
recreation. Under the head of enlightenment he 
includes working for one's self and family and for 
others, cleaning, putting in order, cooking, pre- 
paring fuel, and so forth. " The other half of the 
time I would give to instruction. I would let the 
pupil choose out of seven subjects the one to which 
he is attracted." 

u I would like to add," he says, " that, for the 
purpose of educating one's children, I would not 
advise any one to undertake anything new, such 
as the removal to another place, or some theoretical 
pre-arranged plan as to the organization of the 
school ; I would not recommend the invitation of 
teachers, of assistants, nor of pupils, but would 
make use of circumstances as they exist, gradually 
developing the future, or rather allowing it to 
develop. 

" With regard to drawing and music — the 
teaching of the piano is a glaring example of 
wrongly organized instruction. As with drawing, 
so also with music — children should be taught to 
make use of the means which are always at hand 
(in drawing to use chalk, charcoal, pencil ; in 



48 Uotetos as a Scboolmaster 

music to be able to communicate what they see 
and hear through the medium of their own voice). 
This to begin with. If later on — which would be 
very regrettable — exceptional pupils should mani- 
fest special talent, then they could learn to paint 
with oil colours, or to play on expensive instru- 
ments. 

" For the teaching of this elementary know- 
ledge, I know there now exist good, new hand- 
books. 

" With regard to the teaching of languages, 
the more languages are taught the better. I think 
French and German should be taught by all means, 
English and Esperanto if possible. And one 
should teach by inviting the pupil to read in the 
language he is learning a book with which he is 
acquainted in his native language, endeavouring 
to grasp the general sense and incidentally observ- 
ing the most important words, their roots and 
grammatical forms/ ' 

This letter was not intended for publication, and 
in it Tolstoy explicitly states that he is writing 
offhand, and must give deeper thought to the 
matter. It will seem to most of us that the 
day's task is rather a heavy one, unless the intervals 
of recreation are made very elastic ; but be it re- 
membered that the pupil is to go or come as he 
pleases, and we see that a sovereign remedy for 
overwork is then left in his own hands. 

Tolstoy's predilectiop. for foreign languages is 
explained by the isolation of Russia in the matter 
of speech, so few foreigners as yet taking the 
trouble to learn Russian. It is a fact that a small 
child can pick up several languages as easily as 



TToIstos's Xater IDiews 49 

his native tongue, and that it can be done without 
effort or study. Whether later on, and in the 
absence of a special taste for languages, it is worth 
while to teach them to children, I should have 
my doubts. But here again Tolstoy supplies the 
corrective, for he would teach only those who wish 
to learn. 

In another letter, written to a near relation 
in 1902, and published in Essays and Letters (Grant 
Richards, London ; Funk and Wagnalls Com- 
pany, New York, 1903, p. 338), Tolstoy gives 
some further indications of his present ideas upon 
education. " Children should be taught as little 
as possible," he declares in so many words, for it 
is much worse that they should get u educational 
indigestion and come to detest education/ ' He 
would take especial care to free the children of the 
well-to-do from the parasitic tendencies of their 
position. They should learn to do things for 
themselves, and not to have everything done for 
them. The first condition of a good education, 
he says, is that a child should know that all he 
uses does not fall from heaven ready-made, but is 
produced by other people's labour. He should 
be ashamed to have his boots cleaned by servants, 
" who do it not out of love for him, but for some 
other reason quite unintelligible to him." " If he 
is not ashamed, and if he continues to use them, 
that is the very worst commencement of an 
education, and leaves the deepest traces for his 
whole life." 

" Let them do all they can for themselves," he 
adds ; " carry out their own slops, fill their own 
jugs, wash up, arrange their rooms, clean their 



so Uolstos as a Scboolmaster 

boots and clothes, lay the table, etc. Believe 
me, that unimportant as these things may seem, 
they are a hundred times more important for your 
children's happiness than a knowledge of French 
or of history, etc." Wherever it is possible, he 
advocates work in a kitchen-garden ; and the 
teaching of all these things in the household involves 
the doing of them by the parents, for children 
only do willingly what they see their parents do. 
As the children of the rich are actually brought 
up, there is only one explanation of society possible 
for them, and that is that it is divided into two 
classes — masters and slaves. When their parents 
talk of the brotherhood of man and of the Christian 
obligation of love to neighbour, they are quick to 
see the lie at the basis of it all, and they lose faith 
in their parents and teachers and in morality 
itself. 

In a short article printed as a leaflet by the 
Free Age Press, London (Free Age Press Leaflets, 
No. 4), Tolstoy lays down the rules which in his 
opinion should govern religious education. He 
believes that the child has by nature an instinctive 
knowledge of his relations to the mystefy of life, 
and that the ordinary instruction in religious 
matters perverts and demoralizes him. " The 
child has a vague idea of that source of all, that 
cause of his existence, that force in whose power 
he finds himself, and he possesses an elevated 
idea of that source — indefinite and inexpressible 
in words, but of which his whole being is conscious 
— natural to all rational men. And suddenly, in- 
stead of this, he is told that this source is naught 
else than some sort of personal, self-willed and 



ZTolstos's Xater Diews 51 

dreadful evil being — the Jewish God." * In place 
of teaching him that the road to happiness is by 
" loving communion among men," he is made 
to believe that it depends on " the whims of a 
capricious God," and the liberation of himself 
from eternal punishment, earned by some one 
else, but which this Being has laid upon us all, 
A blind belief in creeds is substituted for love to 
neighbour. 

"HI now had to transmit to a child the sub- 
stance of the religious teaching I consider true," 
says he, "I should say to him that we have come 
into this world and live in it, not according to our 
own will, but according to the will of that which 
we call God, and that it will therefore be well 
with us only when we fulfil this will. This will 
is that we should all be happy ; and for all to be 
happy there is but one means : each must act 
towards others as he would wish that they should 
act towards him. 

"As to the questions about how the world 
came into existence, and what awaits us after 
death, I would answer the first by the acknow- 
ledgment of my ignorance and of the anomaly 
of such a question (in all the Buddhist world 
no such question exists) ; and the second I would 
answer by the conjecture that the will of Him 
who called us into this life for our welfare leads 
us somewhere through death — probably for the 
same purpose." 

1 These later opinions of Tolstoy do not necessarily 
conflict with his earlier conviction that the Old Testament 
is the best book for children, but they would suggest caution 
in the method of making use of it. 



52 XToIstop as a Scboolmaster 



CHAPTER XI 
AN AMERICAN EXPERIMENT 

A small school conducted upon very much the 
same lines as that of Yasnaia Poliana is in active 
operation in a suburb of Brooklyn, New York, 
and I have visited it and,, inspected it for the pur- 
poses of this chapter. It was founded two or 

three years ago by Mrs. F , a trained Kinder- 

gartner, in complete ignorance of Tolstoy's earlier 
experiment, but > she soon heard of it, and the 
account of it rejoiced her soul and gave her new 
courage. 

After eight years in Kindergarten work, she 
had begun to feel that the Kindergarten system, 
in striving to get away from the fossilizing influ- 
ence of the older systems, was becoming fossilized 
/ itself. She had studied the child carefully, and 
come to the conclusion that it has good instincts 
of its own, and that the discipline of schools dulls 
these instincts without providing anything in 
their place. It gradually dawned upon her that 
the best thing to do was to let the child have its 
own way, simply to help it to develop along its own 
lines, and to confine instruction to the answering 
of the cravings of the child. 

As she let these ideas prevail in her manage- 
ment of her Kindergarten, she noticed that the 



Hn Hmerican Experiment 53 

children gained in self-reliance and initiative, 
and she was pleased to learn that those who left 
her to take their places in the regular schools did 
better than other children, so much so that it 
attracted attention — and this, too, although she 
had " taught " them practically nothing, whilst 
the other children had been crammed in the usual 
way. She determined finally to abandon the 
Kindergarten and establish an absolutely free 
school of her own, which was not to be a school 
, at all, but a place for children to grow and gain 
experience of life. 

We all know, as a matter of fact, that children 
have good impulses which drop off as they grow 
older. Every child likes to get out of bed at 
sun-rise. When does the lie-abed habit begin, 
and where does it come from ? Children love to 
be useful and enjoy helping at any kind of service, 
from sweeping the floor to harnessing a horse. 
How does it happen that during their education 
they learn to prefer to have others work for them ? 
Small boys and girls are absolutely democratic, 
and you cannot explain caste-distinctions to them. 
Where is it that they learn them ? 

Mrs. F. wished to preserve what was good in 
these childish proclivities and give them a fair 
chance to develop, and she concluded that the 
interference of big folks had a good deal to do 
with the spoiling of them. So she founded the 
" Playhouse/ ' as the school is called, where from 
eight o'clock in the morning to four in the after- 
noon, and seven days in the week, the children 
come and do as they please, while Mr. and Mrs. 
F. and those of the neighbours who happen 



54 TTotstoB as a Scfooolmastet 

to drop in give such advice as is asked and 
exercise such supervision as is absolutely neces- 
sary. 

Such was the school that I had heard of. 
For a time it was stationed at New Rochelle, : and 
a friend of mine who knew of it there, informed 
me it was the noisiest place in the world. The 
transfer to Brooklyn had worked no change in 
this respect, and it was hardly necessary for me 
to ask which house it was, for the sounds of romp- 
ing were evident enough in the street. As I 
turned in at the gate three or four boys rushed 
down the steps with spades and brooms to clear 
away the snow. They answered my questions, 
and saluted me, some of them politely, and some 
of them less so, and I opened the door and found 
myself in the Playhouse, and a playhouse it most 
certainly was. 

It was a large cheerful room, occupying most of 
the first storey, well stocked with small wooden 
chairs, fortunately of stout construction, which 
stood here, there, or anywhere, and not a few lay 
on the floor with their legs in the air. In some 
of these chairs boys and girls were sitting, varying 
from five to thirteen years of age, writing, draw- 
ing, talking, shouting. Mrs. F. and two friends 
were sitting in the midst of this Bedlam, and they 
came forward smiling and apparently well used 
to the environment and contented with it. I 
found Mr. F. in an alcove working at a carpenter's 
bench, one or two children watching him and 
playing at doing a little work on their own account. 
Mr. F. is a professional man, but he goes in to 
New York to practise his profession only in the 



En Hmerfcan Experiment 55 

afternoon. He gives his half -day, and Mrs. F. 
her whole day, to the cause of education without 
compensation of any kind. 
Mrs. F. does all the housework herself, and as 
^he cooks, washes, and sews, the children cluster 
about her, and she seems to thrive and grow 
happier under the ordeal. There are about fifteen 
children in all, and they come from all classes of 
society, the one objection to the situation of the 
school being that it is in a fashionable neighbour- 
hood and not easy of access to the poor. It is 
purely a neighbourhood affair, as Mrs. F. thinks all 
schools should be, and consequently only two or 
three children of wage-earners are included in the 
Playhouse. This is perhaps not so much of a 
drawback, her experience showing that the wage- 
earning class is the least open to new ideas in 
education, and that usually they insist on the old 
curriculum if they can get it. 

It was a great pity I had not arrived an hour 
earlier, as the children had just finished a perform- 
ance of Wagner's " Nieblungenlied, ,, concluding 
with the " Walkuere," and I saw various bits of 
painted cardboard scenery and of costumes lying 
about ; and a long piece of twine was hanging across 
the room upon which a wonderful parti-coloured 
bird, also of cardboard, was suspended, which 
could be made to fly from one side to the other 
with a considerable degree of realism. As I was 
not brought up in this way, and had never seen 
these operas, and was hence woefully ignorant 
of the parts played by the bird, the ferocious 
dragon whose head lay at my feet, and the various 
characters, I did my best to conceal my short- 



56 ZtoIstoE as a Scboolmaster 

comings as they showed me all their paraphernalia 
of crowns and drapery and laces. 

It seems that one or two of the children had 
seen the operas and had organized this amateur 
company entirely of their own notion and without 
help, a fact which confirms Tolstoy's theory of 
the interest of children in early myths. Mrs. F. 
had only contributed a little music on the piano, 
but even there the eldest girl (she is just thirteen) 
had been able to reproduce the various " motifs " 
herself, and she has learned to read sheet music 
quite cleverly without a single lesson, merely from 
observing others play, asking questions, and trying 
to do it herself. 

This young lady has a marked preference for 
Wagner, and looks down upon all other composers. 
Another child likes Beethoven best, and parti- 
cularly the " Pathetique " sonata. The younger 
children are less particular, and have a preference 
for marches of any kind. Many of them are fond 
of drawing, and I saw a quantity of their pro- 
ductions, some of which they had framed with 
their own hands, occasionally cutting the frame out 
of a single block of wood. The children take the 
greatest pride in each other's work, boasting of it 
almost as if it were their own — another childish 
) trait which soon disappears under the ordinary 
course of education. 

They are left in drawing, as in everything else, 
very much to their own devices. One boy had 
drawn a picture of a grove of trees and wished to 
make a road through it. To do this he ran two 
parallel lines across the paper from top to bottom 
and brought the picture to Mrs. F. "I don't see 



an Hmerican Experiment 57 

what the matter is with it," he said. " It ought 
to look like a road, but it looks like a pole. What 
ought I to do ? " "It took men a great many 
years to find out," said Mrs. F., " and perhaps it 
will take you a long time too." Several days 
later he brought her another picture with a road 
in proper perspective. He had worked it out for 
himself. 

" But how do you teach them the necessary 
reading, writing, and arithmetic ? " I asked Mrs. 
F. " Why, they can't help learning them," she 
answered. " They are in the air." And, sure 
enough, the children ask to be taught. There 
are things which they wish to know — knowledge 
\ which they crave to have — and the wisest policy 
is to wait until they crave it, for then it goes to 
the right place. It is all a matter of appetite. 
What a child eats with an appetite nourishes it, 
but that which you force down its throat makes 
it ill and gives it indigestion. 

I know it is so in my own case. Many of my 
good friends insist upon lending me excellent books 
when I am not in the mood for reading, and as I 
have a troublesome conscience and dislike to say 
I have read a book when I have not, I am forced 
to wade through them against my will, and never 
by any chance do I gain benefit from them ; but 
let my interest be roused in some particular line 
of thought, and let me find a book that has pre- 
ceded me along it, and I devour it and make it a 
part of myself, and it might perhaps be the very 
same book which wearied me a year or two before, 
because then it arrived at an inopportune moment. 
Give the child or the man what he has an appetite 






58 Uolsto£ as a Scboolmaster 

for. If his appetite is out of order, try to cure it, 
but do not stuff him against his will. 

A child naturally has a healthy appetite for 
knowledge. All we need to do is to give it a 
chance. And the result is that these Playhouse 
children love to write, and are continually doing 
it for fun, while the school children who come in 
occasionally as guests hate it, and look upon it as 
.a punishment. These outsiders are soon bored 
/too, and ask piteously what to do, while the 
regular Playhousers are never at a loss for occu- 
pation, and storm the house before it is open for 
business in the morning. 

The children are fond of having stories read to 
them. Sometimes they ask for them many days 
in succession, and then again they will not call for 
them for several days. They pick up reading in 
connexion with these stories, trying to find their 
favourite stories for themselves in the book, 
following the reading, and gradually learning to 
recognize now this word and now that. 

Mrs. F. laughs at the ordinary method : " I see 
a cat. Do you see a cat ? " People do not talk 
that way. Why, then, should they learn to read 
in that way ? I inquired what she would do in 
case a child showed too great fondness for books, 
and neglected outdoor exercise in consequence. 
She said that she had not yet met such an abnor- 
mal boy or girl, and that only unnatural conditions 
could produce them. 

As for arithmetic, that too the children learned 
in everyday life. One little girl of her own accord 
kept a record of the number of times she could 
" jump rope " without missing. Another, eight 



Hn Hmerican Experiment 59 

years old, announces that she is to receive eleven- 
pence from her mother, that she would pay five- 
pence that she owed out of it, and with the sixpence 
left buy marbles at ten for a ha'penny, to wit, 120 
in all. She does this " arithmetic " in her head 
as rapidly as she can talk, and it is much more 
real to her than any number of " examples/ ' 
Besides such actual experiences the children often 
ask to be shown how to " do sums," and I saw 
several of these attempts upon paper, quite ortho- 
dox in appearance. 

They absorb contemporary history in the same 
way, and were all much interested in the Russo- 
Japanese war, frequently taking sides and fighting 
it out for themselves. There is little chance of 
their learning ancient history in this way, but 
Mrs. F. asserts boldly that teaching such things 
in school is never worth while, for every one forgets 
them ; and although at first this statement seemed 
absurd to me, the more I think of it, the truer it 
appears. With the exception of some Greek and 
Latin and a little mathematics, I can hardly recall 
a thing which I learned at school. Practically all 
that I know of history and geography and litera- 
ture was learned elsewhere, and I am inclined to 
think that this is a common experience. If this 
is so, the Playhouse children do not lose much. 
" They get their geography from where they go," 
says Mrs. F. (and she had never heard of the 
Russian comedy which speaks to the same effect), 
" and they get their history in the doings of their 
daily lives, their kittens and their dogs." 

Mr. and Mrs. F. are not " non-resistants." 
They do not believe in letting the children ride 



6o Uolstos as a Scboolmastet 

rough-shod over them, and if the invasion of their 
own rights were pronounced enough they would 
interfere in any way that they deemed necessary. 
But they interpret their own rights meagrely, and 
have apparently no objection to the invasion of 
their ear-drums by noise of all kinds. They fre- 
quently remind the children, however, that musical 
voices are pleasanter than strident ones, that boots 
should be wiped on the mat, and that it is best to 
put things back in their places. 

In dealing with the children they always try to 
bear in mind that they are dealing with inex- 
perienced individuals, and they are patient with 
them in consequence, and if possible endeavour to 
put them in the way of learning from experience. 
And they declare most positively that they have 
discovered that the weakest method of influencing 
1 a child is to use force. The experience which a 
child gets from the use of force is precisely the 
wrong one. He gets the idea that justice is an 
arbitrary and despotic matter, and that to domi- 
neer and dominate is the true way of living, in 
which in time he must take his part. It produces 
a world of slaves and masters, but it cannot 
produce freemen or men fit for freedom. Prisons 
do not change character or desire, says Mr. F, 
They either fail altogether to diminish the amount 
of crime, or they only do so by enfeebling the 
prisoner and making a weakling of him — a coward 
with a broken will. 

They have had little thieves to deal with at the 
Playhouse, and they cured them by developing 
their self-respect. In the same way — not without 
temporary discouragements and set-backs, but 



an american Experiment 61 

with ultimate success — they have persuaded liars 
to prefer telling the truth. And these results have 
made the teachers lose faith in the doctrine of 
heredity, and they believe that a proper environ- 
ment can make a good member of society of any 
one. I asked them if they did not think that all 
boys pass through a barbarian stage, but they 
answered that if this was so it was usually before 
the children came into their hands, for they found 
them uniformly open to reason, and only unreason- 
able and difficult to get on with so long as the 
effect of former regimes of " discipline " clung to 
them. 

The world is full of unavoidable discipline, why 
add artificially to it ? There is the discipline of 
difficulty in doing what you wish to do, of carving 
stubborn wood, of drawing elusive figures, of 
composing reluctant sentences — the discipline of 
coming to a common understanding with your 
fellows as to what you will do and will not do — 
the discipline of nature, of submitting to illness 
and rainy weather. The only valuable discipline 
to add to these is self -discipline, and that is dis- 
couraged by the introduction of the master ex 
machind. And are we quite sure that forcing 
children to do irksome things makes them better 
able to cope with future hardships ? 

The F.s do not even teach politeness, but they 
claim that the rudest boys wear smooth at the 
edges in the kindly friction of the Playhouse. 
I saw ample proofs of affection at any rate, be- 
tween teacher and taught (though these terms 
are misnomers), if a somewhat promiscuous kissing 
before recess can be admitted as evidence. Some 



62 Uolstos as a Scboolmastet 

of the children were discussing the question the 
other day as to why Mrs. F. bestowed so much time 
upon them. " Auntie doesn't get paid," said an 
eight-year-old boy (and I think it was one of those 
who formerly showed thieving and lying proclivi- 
ties), " Auntie doesn't get paid. She gets 
love." 

To sum up, the Playhouse is a place where the 
child can express itself and have its neighbourhood 
experience, " where he is free to act, but also free 
to get the full reaction, reflection, and consequence 
of his act." The first aim is the cultivation of 
initiative, of self-expression, both of which are 
destroyed by the ordinary school system. And, 
strange to say, along the line of free self-expression 
lies the supreme virtue of concentration. Our 
usual idea of the best way to develop concentra- 
tion of mind is to drag the child away violently 
from his own line of thought and insist upon his 
following another and probably a distasteful one, 
and then we wonder at his unwillingness and in- 
ability to persist in the new path. 

Clearly the best way to induce him to fix his mind 
is to let it rest where it prefers to rest. And there, 
where it happens to be, let it find out the next 
thing for itself, exercising that faculty of origin- 
ality which makes the free and independent man. 
To find out a thing for yourself is far better than 
to be taught it. Have we solved the problem of 
living, the riddle of the universe, so well (asks 
Mr. F.), that we can insist upon forcing our solu- 
tion in all its details upon our children ? Why 
not encourage them to answer questions for them- 
selves ? We need full-grown men and women, 



Hn Hmerfcan Experiment 63 

and full growth comes from experience, and not 
from the cramming of information. 

And self-expression calls for the right of others 
to self-expression, which means justice and 
equality. The child must learn this from ex- 
perience too, and it is a delicate matter to attempt 
to supply the deficiencies of nature in her methods 
of teaching it. The slipper and ruler, the school- 
room prison, the extra task, are clumsy instru- 
ments of justice at best. A properly developed 
child will submit voluntarily to natural justice. 
One of the Playhouse boys broke a plaster cast, 
carelessly knocking it over with a stick. At the 
time everything was done to soothe his grief, but 
a few days later Mrs. F. explained to him that the 
cast cost money, that some one would have to 
bear the loss, and that it was most reasonable that 
it should fall upon him ; and at latest accounts he 
was cheerfully saving his pennies for the purpose 
of making good the damage. 

One curious thing the F.s have ascertained, 
and that is that among the most one-sided and 
prejudiced of children are those of radicals and 
" free-thinkers " and anarchists. There is a dog- 
matism of the undogmatic which is more offen- 
sive than the old-fashioned narrowness of sects, 
because it professes liberality, though it is really 
quite as narrow. The " free-thinker " forces his 
own brand of thought upon his offspring as re- 
lentlessly as the most orthodox of Methodists. 
The Playhouse system aims to leave the child 
actually free, but the " free-thinker " too often 
insists upon handing down to posterity intact his 
own particular scheme of philosophy. Men are 



64 XTolstoi? as a Scboolmaster 

much alike, partly perhaps because they have all 
been educated in the same way. When play- 
houses become more common they may begin to 
differ. 

The F.s believe that neither man nor woman 
is fitted to educate alone. " They must conjoin 
the qualities possessed by each, so that the child's 
whole nature may be understood and responded' 
to. So every playhouse should have in it the 
man and woman united in mutual love and interest 
in the child/ ' But this is the case at home. Why 
not leave the child there ? Because, they answer, 
the child itself expresses the need to go out from 
the house ; it craves a larger society, and any 
observer can discover the fact for himself. 

What are we to think of the Playhouse ? I 
found the principal of a large public school ready 
to condemn it on hearsay. Children of a certain 
class, he said, are not amenable to kindness. 
They yield to force, and nothing but force. And 
he may be right when a single individual is called 
upon to handle several hundreds of miscellaneous 
boys. You can break a single horse by kindness, 
while, if you had to break a dozen in the same time, 
you would be forced to obtain more rapid results 
in a cruder way. The Playhouse is only adapted 
to a small neighbourhood school — to an enlarged 
family — and it requires in its managers infinite 
patience and enthusiasm and love for children. 
Such teachers are rare, and neighbourhoods in 
which they could gather a few youngsters about 
them are infrequent. Still, I would like to see the 
experiment break out in spots here and there, and 
I believe it will make a real contribution to the 



Uolstos at Ibome 65 

solution of the educational problem — of which, of 
course, there never can be a final solution, for it 
will change its aspects from year to year as men 
know more and think deeper and love harder. 



CHAPTER XII 

TOLSTOY AT HOME 

While Mr. and Mrs. F. doubt the advisability of 
educating the child at home, Tolstoy seems to be 
of a different opinion, and it may be of interest to 
repeat here a story which shows his manner of 
giving moral instruction to his own children. 
When I visited him at Yasnaia Poliana in 1894, 
there was a Swiss governess living with his family 
who was charged with the education of the younger 
children. I am very sure that Tolstoy does not 
approve of governesses qua governesses. A 
governess is a luxury, and it is only in her character 
as a human being that she can find justification, 
and I take it for granted that the existence of a 
governess in the Tolstoy household was a con- 
cession to the Countess. It must be remembered 
that Tolstoy is a " non-resistant," and when his 
wife wishes things to be thus and so, his principles 
force him to yield. 

(Would it not be a good plan everywhere to 
require that in all marriages one of the contracting 



66 Uolstos as a Schoolmaster 

parties should be a " non-resistant " ? and would 
not this party invariably be the husband ? But 
this is a digression.) 

The essential fact is that there was a governess 
in the house, a strict Calvinist from Geneva, who 
watched the little Tolstoys day and night lest 
they might follow the heretical ways of their 
father. She could not quite understand the Count. 
She admitted to me that he was a saint. He pro- 
duced good fruit, she could not deny it. But was 
it possible for a thistle to bring forth figs ? and 
that he was at heart a thistle seemed evident from 
his absolute detachment from the sound roots of 
dogma. 

" He must be a better Christian than he thinks 
he is/' she whispered to me knowingly, and she 
laboured sedulously that her youthful wards might 
not only be Christians, but know that they were. 
It is, however, simply as a source of information, 
and not as a worthy representative of Presbyter- 
ianism that we have to do with the governess. It 
is not always easy to ask a man's sons and daugh- 
ters for information about him, and still less to 
catechise him about himself, but governesses are 
doubtless provided by providence for the purpose 
of telling true stories to inquisitive visitors, and 
in fulfilment of this important function the gover- 
ness in question told me a story. 

Only two or three days before my arrival, she 
said, little Sasha, the pretty, sturdy ten-year-old 
daughter of the Count, had been playing in front 
of the house with a peasant boy from the village. 
They quarrelled, as children do, and the lad in his 
anger picked up a stick and hit her with it on the 



Uolstos at Ibome 67 

arm. It was a hard knock, and the child rushed 
crying into the house, exhibiting an ugly black 
and blue mark below the elbow. She had evi- 
dently not read her father's books, for she ran at 
once to him and besought him in the midst of her 
sobs to come out and punish her assailant. Here 
was an opportunity for the governess to observe 
how the Count would apply his doctrines in his 
own home, and she listened attentively. 

Tolstoy took the child gently on his knee, wiped 
away her tears and examined the bruise. They 
are too far off for us to hear the conversation, but 
we can easily reconstruct it from the tenor of his 
many writings on the subject of punishment. 

" Why, Sasha," said the father, " what good 
would it do for me to whip the boy ? It wouldn't 
make your arm hurt any the less." 

" Yes it would. Boo-hoo-hoo. He's a naughty, 
bad boy, and you must whip him ! Boo-hoo — " 

" Now just think a minute, Sasha. Why did 
he hit you ? It was because he was angry with 
you, wasn't it ? That is, because he hated you ? 
Now if I whip him, won't he hate you a great deal 
more, and hate me too ? It seems to me that the 
best thing for us to do is to make him love us in- 
stead, and then he will never hit you again. But 
if we make him hate us, he may go on hating 
people all his life long." 

By this time Sasha had stopped crying, for her 
arm pained her no longer, and her thirst for ven- 
geance had consequently become less acute. 

" I tell you what I would do, dear, if I were 
you," the Count went on to say. " You know 
there is some of that raspberry- jam in the pantry 



68 Uolstos as a Scboolmaster 

left over from supper yesterday. If I were you 
I would get some in a saucer and take it out to 
your little friend." 

This advice must have startled Sasha. Why 
was it that she followed it ? for she did. Perhaps 
it was her wish to please her father, whom she 
loved dearly — perhaps it was curiosity to see what 
the young man would do, and perhaps the sug- 
gestion appealed to her sense of humour. How- 
ever that may be, she went to the pantry, and the 
governess who saw her go lives to tell the tale. 
She got the jam and she took it out to her enemy. 

There is one weak point about this story, and 
that is that all the rest that I know of it is that 
the boy ate the jam. 

Years have passed away, and he may have 
poisoned his grandmother and committed all the 
crimes in the decalogue since that day. The 
daring experiment in penology may have proved 
an utter failure. But I have often thought 
lovingly of this story even in its truncated state. 
It is as beautiful to me as the Venus de Milo, and 
I am content to let my imagination complete the 
outline. I am sure that there was a better chance 
for that boy after swallowing the raspberry jam 
than there would have been if he had received the 
beating which he richly deserved. 

Is it not true that the removal of hatred is the 
highest aim of reform, and that forgiveness and 
affection are the surest means of accomplishing 
this result ? The raspberry jam was the earnest 
of a fund of love which no insult nor injury could 
diminish, and in the face of such an overflowing 
store of goodness how mean and small and petty 



TTolstoB at ttome 6 9 

the lad must have felt his anger and hatefulness 
to be ! 

Put yourself in his place for a moment. He is 
still hanging about near the house, but not too 
near the door. After a while he sees it open, and 
he makes ready to take to his heels, expecting to 
see an irate father with a stick. But, lo and be- 
hold ! it is his erstwhile playmate, smiling through 
her tears, and bringing, of all things in the world, 
a plate of raspberry jam ! How he must have 
tried to steel himself to the point of rejecting the 
enticing sweetmeat with disdain ! But the temp- 
tation was too great. Little peasant boys do not 
have raspberry jam every day of the week, and at 
last he is sheepishly advancing. 

He grabs the plate and gulps down its contents 
without a word, and with his eyes fixed on the 
ground. Then he slinks down the hill, and if the 
human race had not frittered away their tails by 
overmuch sedentary life, he would have carried 
that useful and expressive member well between 
his legs. If he had been whipped he would have 
gone down the hill to the village swearing at all 
the Tolstoy family, with the rest of creation thrown 
in. As it is, his thoughts are confused, but the 
prevailing one is that he has acted like a naughty 
boy and a fool in the bargain, and that these 
loving, forgiving people are a great deal better 
than he is. If there was a spark of good in that 
boy — and there is such a spark in all boys — it 
must have been kindled into a flame by the plate 
of raspberry jam. 

I am aware that everybody will not agree with 
me. I told this story once to an audience in New 



7o ZTolstos as a Scboolmaster 

Jersey. They have some queer people over in 
Jersey, and one of them was there that night, 
and he took advantage of the discourteous and 
disconcerting custom of asking the lecturer ques- 
tions after he had finished his discourse, a sort of 
baiting by which his hearers take vengeance upon 
him for having to sit still under him so long. He 
was a venerable and kindly old gentleman with a 
white beard, and he got up in the back of the hall 
and said — 

" I know what that boy would do." 

" What ? " I asked. 

" He would come up to the house the next day 
and hit her on the other arm ! " 

I do not know to this hour whether the old 
gentleman meant what he said or not. But here 
we have the two opposite theories, that of the old 
gentleman of New Jersey and that of the old 
gentleman of Russia, and between them lies all 
the debatable land of human conduct. Which 
of the two was more deeply versed in the nature 
of man, and is jam or the stick, forgiveness or 
punishment, vengeance or love, the better civi- 
lizer ? There is certainly an element of beauty 
in the little incident, and can there be beauty 
without truth ? And if there is truth in the 
Russian point of view, is it not a truth which can 
be applied far more frequently in our daily lives 
and in the institutions which express them ? This 
is a matter for teachers to consider. 

And I must add a confirmatory anecdote which 
a friend of mine, having read the jam story, sent 
me from Illinois — 

"lam prompted to tell you a little experience 



^Xolstos at 1bome 71 

of my boy Howard," he writes. " He is seven 
years old, has never had any quarrels that I know 
of, and, I think, has a very kindly, peaceable dis- 
position. But one day last summer he came in 
from school much disturbed. A family had just 
moved in across the street, and the boy (about 
Howard's age), on the way home from school, had 
stoned him, throwing stones in a wicked sort of 
way. Our landlord's daughter, four years older, 
confirmed Howard's story, was incensed, and 
called his assailant a little ' rough,' and suggested 
that Howard should go to school under her care 
and protection. But I thought it a good time to 
follow Jesus' plan, and after talking to my little 
man somewhat after the manner you imagined 
Tolstoy did to his little one, I suggested that he 
immediately take over to the stone-thrower a 
sample of some fine peaches that we had just 
received. My part, to talk — to suggest this — 
was easy, but the divine doing he was ready for — 
bless the lad ! He picked out one of the finest 
peaches and was off. I watched him from behind 
a curtain march without fear or hesitancy across 
the street and into the garden and up to his enemy. 
The peach was accepted. The enemy was thus 
at small cost killed, so to speak, and a lasting 
lesson of the uses and powers of love was left in 
the mind of my boy. He has no enemies now, 
and needs no protection." 



12 XTolstos as a Scboolmaster 



CHAPTER XIII 

A CHAPTER ON PENOLOGY 

In discussing the moral education of children in 
the last chapter I found myself naturally using 
the word " penology," and once or twice before 
we have been led by metaphor or example to see 
the close relationship between penology and 
pedagogy. The problem which is presented by 
naughty boys is much the same as that presented 
by naughty men, and it is not altogether a digres- 
sion to devote a few pages to the latter. 

Tolstoy disapproves altogether of punishment 
in any form and of the exercise of force by man 
upon man, and he is quite ready to dispense with 
prisons altogether. This seems like a very radical 
position, but, strange to say, the most competent 
prison experts go almost as far. Mr. Charlton 
T. Lewis, President of the National Prison Associa- 
tion of the United States for the past twenty years, 
declared in his address before the National Prison 
Congress at Louisville in 1903 that " our county 
jails everywhere are the schools and colleges of 
crime. In the light of social science it were better 
for the world if every one of them were destroyed 
than that this work should be continued." And 
again : " Experience shows that the system of 
imprisonment of minor offenders for short terms 
is but a gigantic measure for the manufacture 
of criminals," " Freedom, not confinement," he 



H Chapter on fl>enoloflg 73 

adds, " is the natural state of man, and the only 
condition under which influences for reformation 
can have their full efficiency. ,, 

In an address to a former Prison Congress 
(Hartford, Sept. 25, 1899, published in the 
Yale Law Journal of October, 1899) the same 
authority says : " Prison life is unnatural at best. 
Man is a social creature. Confinement tends to 
lower his consciousness of dignity and responsi- 
bility, to weaken the motives which govern his 
relations to his race, to impair the foundations 
of character and unfit him for independent life. 
To consign a man to prison is commonly to en- 
rol him in the criminal class.' ' . . . With all the 
solemnity and emphasis of which I am capable, 
I utter the profound conviction, after twenty 
years of constant study of our prison population, 
that more than nine-tenths of them ought never 
to have been confined." 

Mr. Lewis makes a strong plea for the " inde- 
terminate sentence," and the release from prison, 
under proper supervision, of all prisoners whose 
release would not be a menace to society. " In 
all but extreme cases of depravity, what is needed 
with the youth beginning a lawless career is that 
the social motives in him be awakened and 
strengthened, that the habit of foresight, the 
sense of responsibility, the regard for the esteem 
of his fellows, the sympathy with mankind, be 
aroused to constant action. It is in the social 
life of the community that this work can properly 
be done." 

The report of the Committee on Preventive 
Social Work made to the Fourth New York State 



74 ZTolstcn? as a Schoolmaster 

Conference of Charities at Buffalo in Nove. iber, 
1903, is as strong in its condemnation of prisons 
as Mr. Lewis — the Chairman of the Committee, 
Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes, having taken part in the 
Prison Congress at Louisville. This Committee 
speaks as follows : " At the Thirty-Second Annual 
Congress of the National Prison Association, re- 
cently held in Louisville, Kentucky, there were 
present upward of one hundred prison officers 
representing the penal institutions of the United 
States and Canada, and as many penologists and 
criminologists and students of social movements. 
The sessions of the Congress lasted five days, and 
throughout the entire proceedings there was not 
a dissentient voice raised against the opinion 
voiced by many of the speakers, that the prisons 
themselves are among the principal sources of 
crime, and that they probably create far more 
crime than they cure. There were those present 
who maintained (and they among the ablest and 
most experienced), and who presented impressive 
evidence and arguments to show, that upon the 
whole the influence of most of our prisons upon 
the offenders and upon society should be regarded 
as detrimental rather than the reverse." 

Upon such a statement of the case, made by 
those who manage the prisons and know most 
about them, the question naturally arises : Why, 
then, not abolish the prisons ? But Tolstoy does 
not go so far as this. He does not propose aboli- 
tion. He virtually says : "I do not believe in 
exercising coercion on my fellow-men, and hence 
I cannot undertake to execute or imprison them 
directly or indirectly. Let him who is without 



H Cfoapter on penology is 

sin cast the first stone. Who am I to act as judge ? 
And as people come gradually round to my opinion, 
there will be fewer and fewer left who will be will- 
ing to act as hangman and jailers and warders, 
until finally such professions disappear." 

And here and there I see evidences that this 
leaven is working in society. The headsman 
showed his sense of shame by wearing a mask. 
The hangman's occupation has always been held 
infamous, and I see no reason why that of the 
" electrician " who manages an " electrocution " 
should be less so. Some years ago a hanging took 
place in a Canadian town, and they could not find 
a carpenter in the neighbourhood who was willing 
to erect the scaffold, and finally they had to send 
to a distant city to engage an artisan sufficiently 
barbarous to undertake the job. Even soldiers 
have the decency to serve out one rifle with a 
blank cartridge to an execution squad so that 
each man may hope that he is innocent of the 
victim's blood. 

Maupassant relates an interesting story in his 
Sur VEau of an assassin who was condemned to 
death at Monaco. No one could be found in the 
principality to execute him, and the French 
government charged too much for its friendly 
offices. The sentence was consequently com- 
muted to imprisonment for life, but after a time 
this also was found an expensive charge upon the 
little country, and they besought the prisoner to 
escape, which he flatly refused to do. Finally, 
we are told that they agreed to pay him a pension, 
and he was induced to settle just over the border 
in France. Maupassant records this as an his- 



76 ZTolstos as a Scboolmaster 

torical fact, and in relating it I do not know how 
far he allowed his art to triumph over his accuracy. 

The case of Sheriff Mines, of Camden, New 
Jersey, who died in 1903, is in point. According 
to the newspapers his death resulted directly from 
the execution of a criminal. He had dreaded the 
ordeal beforehand, but had nerved himself suffi- 
ciently to carry it through. When it was over, 
however, his health failed, and he began to waste 
away. He could not get the scenes of the execu- 
tion out of his mind, and they preyed upon him 
until he collapsed altogether at his office, was 
taken home, and, after lingering a few weeks in 
bed, died. The doctors called it " acute indiges- 
tion brought on by worry," but a more profound 
diagnosis would ascribe his death to " maladapta- 
tion to environment due to his superior civiliza- 
tion ." If Mr. Mines had foreseen the outcome of 
his act, he would have resigned his office before 
the day of execution, and when the time comes 
when no one can be found to fill such a vacancy, 
capital punishment will have been effectively 
abolished. 

Tolstoy's attention was first called to capital 
punishment when, as a young man, he witnessed 
an execution by the guillotine at Paris, and he 
instinctively felt then and there that the whole 
thing was evil and only evil. It was simply one 
man killing another. We talk of the " State's " 
hanging a man, but a State cannot hang. We 
cannot avoid responsibility for our individual acts 
in that way. And what good does capital punish- 
ment do ? Life is just as safe in countries where 
it no longer prevails. 



H Cbaptet on penology 77 

It has no deterrent effect, and this was shown 
by the assassination of President McKinley. He 
had just completed a journey through fifteen or 
more of the States, in several of which capital 
punishment had been abolished. A week before 
his murder he had passed several days in Michigan, 
where they stopped hanging people thirty years 
ago. Czolgosz might have shot him there (and it 
was nearer the murderers home than the actual 
scene of the deed) with the absolute certainty of 
escaping with his life. But what did he do ? He 
waited until the President had entered a State 
where speedy expiation by death was inevitable, 
and here it was that he accomplished his design. 
If capital punishment had any effect at all, it was 
to precipitate the crime, and it is not impossible 
that the prospect of a trial for his life and the 
dramatic surroundings of an execution really had 
some influence in fixing his choice of place for the 
crime. But the fact is that criminals rarely think 
of punishment. Their mind is engrossed with 
the criminal act, and they either snap their fingers 
at the penalty or expect to avoid it. 

And capital punishment is demoralizing to those 
who take part in it, to those who read of it, and to 
all the inmates of the prison in which it is per- 
formed. For this last fact, read the Ballad of 
Reading Gaol, and that the same is true in Sing- 
Sing prison is proved by the fact that the officials 
of that institution petitioned the Legislature some 
years ago to remove all executions to the little 
prison of Dannemora, in the Adirondack wilder- 
ness, on account of the pernicious effect which 
such events had upon the prisoners generally. 



78 xrolstos as a Schoolmaster 

When the State feels impelled to go off into the 
woods to do its work, we may be sure that it is 
dirty work which ought to be left undone. 

The proper treatment for a criminal is to de- 
velop the good that is in him, and there is always 
at least a germ of good. I was reminded of this 
fact a year or two ago, when, during a visit to 
Georgia, I learned that a convict had made his 
escape in a daring manner from the new Federal 
prison at Atlanta. Descriptions of the man were 
at once telegraphed all over the country, and in 
these he was designated as a " desperate char- 
acter/' And what do you suppose was the occupa- 
tion which had been assigned to this " desperate 
character " in the prison ? He had been ap- 
pointed barber, and he had been accustomed from 
morning till night to wield a sharpened razor 
upon the throats of his fellows ! He had been 
trusted to this extent — and could trust go farther ? 
— and he had fully justified the trust reposed in 
him. The story was a lesson to me in penology. 
It showed that the safety of the community rests 
upon the good will of our fellows far more than 
upon the threatening arm of the law, and that 
the kindliness even of ruffians is one of the bul- 
warks of society. 

Men in prison differ very little from those out- 
side. Ask any humane and sympathetic warden, 
and he will tell you that a small proportion of the 
prisoners in his charge have the criminal head, 
and seem to have been predestined to a life of 
crime. Is it not rather hard to punish men for 
the shape of their skulls ? An asylum would be 
the proper place for them. And then the rest of 



H Cbapter on Atenolol 79 

the prisoners, he would tell you, are very, very 
much like you and me. So that, barring the small 
class of defectives, if all the prisons were emptied 
to-day, and you and I and our friends put in in- 
stead, the world would go on very much the same. 
Mankind is not divided into good and bad people, 
but each individual has his good half and his bad 
half, and the best of all discipline is that which is 
exercised by the saint in a man over the sinner 
in him. This is the only real self-government, 
and the education which tends toward it is worth 
more for the public safety than all our penal in- 
stitutions put together. 

And how ineffectual those institutions are ! 
Over ten thousand homicides are committed in 
the United States every year, and probably not 
ten per cent, of the perpetrators are punished. 
The other ninety per cent, are at large — not only 
of last year, but of the preceding years — and yet 
we are not afraid. Then we know that all the 
men who will commit next year's murders are 
free to-day, and the murderers of the immediately 
succeeding years as well, and that nothing can 
prevent it ; and yet we go on living in tranquillity, 
not relying evidently upon the power of the law 
so much as upon the good will toward us of the 
human beings among whom we are placed. 

Then when the law does intervene, how far'does 
it protect us ? It usually imprisons the criminal. 
A life imprisonment is rarely served out to the 
end, and we may practically consider imprison- 
ment as a temporary punishment. r> We take a 
" desperate character/ ' put him in prison, keep 
him there under harsh and forbidding circum- 



8o Uolstos as a Schoolmaster 

stances for five or ten years, and then release him 
absolutely. It is (as Mr. Lewis says) " as if 
one should cage a man-eating tiger for a month 
or a year and then turn him loose. 1 ' Is it likely 
that he will come out with a greater feeling of 
consideration for his fellows than when he went 
in ? Is he not perfectly sure to be a more " des- 
perate character " than he was at the beginning ? 
And can such a policy be considered to any great 
extent protective of society ? 

Our penal laws have only one legitimate object, 
and that is to make better men. Crime is the 
result of lovelessness, when it is not a disease, and 
the true field of reformatory activity is to produce 
a spark of love in human souls. How little our 
prisons are adapted to this end is sufficiently 
evident. As for capital punishment, it is a clear 
evasion of our duty. What right have we, as 
some one has asked, to make a sort of Botany 
Bay of the world to come, and send our hardest 
cases there without consulting the wishes of the 
inhabitants ? Nurses in hospitals fight over the 
most desperate cases, and prefer them to all others ; 
and so the true penologist should long to exercise 
his healing influence upon the most advanced, 
and consequently the most interesting, cases of 
wickedness. There is not a man living so low 
but we can do something better with him than 
hang him. 

Whether we ever arrive at such a conception 
of the police powers of the government or not — 
and there are not wanting indications that society 
is headed in that direction — it is, at any rate, a 
pleasure to find that we owe most of our security 



a Cbapter on penology 81 

not to gibbets and dungeons and the resulting 
cowardice and fear, but rather to the natural 
kindliness of our fellow-creatures, an atmosphere 
which is conducive not only to safety, but to 
happiness. 

It will be a slow matter, the gradual apprehen- 
sion of the truth regarding crime and punishment, 
scientifically and sympathetically. In Burmah 
punishment is looked upon as an expiation for 
crime, and when the prisoner has paid his debt 
to society he comes out a new man. His books 
are balanced, and he is as good as any one else. 
(See Mr. Fielding's fascinating book, The Soul of 
a People.) With us, on the contrary, the punish- 
ment is a far greater stain than the crime. Most 
of us could easily stand the burden of an ancestor 
who had committed murder, but the ignominy 
of one who had been hanged would be almost 
overwhelming. 

Further than this there may be a redeeming 
element in crime itself. Edward Carpenter 
suggests in one of his luminous essays that the 
criminal often keeps alive some necessary social 
element which the prevailing society has neglected. 
We may thus suppose that the smuggler is not so 
much a criminal as a protester against the un- 
natural shackles of trade and an object lesson in 
a higher morality than that of his fellow-citizens. 

It is a fact that the greatest crimes are also the 
greatest virtues. High treason is the first of 
crimes, and it is also often the first of duties. How 
many of the great benefactors of the race have 
stood in the prisoner's dock ? Until recently a 
picture of the crucifixion, the greatest miscarriage 

F 



82 ZTolstos as a Scboolmaster 

of justice, hung in every French court-room. The 
Government has recently ordered them to be re- 
moved, but it was ill-advised, I think, for I know 
of no better reminder to the bench of its errors and 
limitations. It would have been better to add 
other pictures of the great and good convicts of 
history, whose faces would be likely to instil 
greater modesty into the hearts of the enforcers 
of the law. 

And the vulgar criminal may have his virtues, 
too. Let us call that enlightened witness, Mr. 
Lewis, again. He speaks of convicts, " whom I 
regard as heroes upon the face of the earth, and 
before whom I am happy to bow in reverence as 
to those to whom I must give precedence by a true 
standard of manhood. For I know my life has 
wrought no such heroic work as that of the man 
who, under the terrible burden of inherited degrada- 
tion and accumulated shame, has achieved the 
conquest of self, the victory over passion, the 
triumph over his own past and over the prejudices 
of a community which had learned to distrust and 
despise him." 

The " indeterminate sentence " and the " pro- 
bation " system, in the hands of men like Mr. Lewis, 
would certainly be a great advance in the right 
direction, and he declares that wherever they have 
been fairly tried they have succeeded marvellously. 
The criminal, like the child, must learn in society, 
and not in a school which shuts him out from real 
life. The convict at large could be committed to 
the supervision of such societies as the Prison 
Association, the " Volunteers w or the Salvation 
Army. 



H Cbapter on penology 83 

But society itself is largely responsible for the 
crime committed within it. We forget the solid- 
arity of social conduct, and that we are members 
one of another, and silent partners in each other's 
misdeeds. Beside each criminal prosecution, 
" The People against John Doe," I would like to 
see another action instituted entitled " John Doe 
against the People," in which the community 
should be brought to book for having made a 
criminal of the plaintiff or permitted him to become 
one, and the evidence offered would be that of 
unjust social conditions, improper environment, 
the limitation of opportunities and the short- 
comings of education. 

" Every student of our penal administration 
knows well that the criminal class is, generation 
after generation, the continual product of our 
social system," says Mr. Lewis, and he points out, 
as an example, the evil effect of imprisonment 
for petty offences, but his remark is true in the 
widest sense. We must be just in our social and 
industrial arrangements before we can decently 
talk of " administering justice," and we must in 
educating the child begin to develop that germ of 
good which, if it is once allowed to atrophy, may 
sooner or later leave him an apt candidate for 
membership in the criminal classes. 



84 XColstos as a Scboolmaster 



CHAPTER XIV 

TRUE AND FALSE EDUCATION 

Some years ago I visited the University of El 
Azhar at Cairo, the most famous seat of learning 
in the Mohammedan world. On the stone floor 
of the vast mosque, some under the roof and some 
in the open air, I saw the professors in their tur- 
bans and gowns sitting each at the foot of his 
column and surrounded by his group of students, 
and all of them, teachers and taught, were swaying 
back and forth, reading aloud in sing-song from 
books which they held close to their eyes and 
which swayed up and down with them. I believe 
that the book was invariably the Koran, but, to 
judge from the sound, each individual was reading 
a different passage. I had tried to read the Koran 
in an English translation, and had formed a very 
poor opinion of it, and hence I looked with amaze- 
ment upon this venerable travesty of an education. 
For the past thousand years, from the ends of 
Islam, from India, Arabia, Turkestan, the Philip- 
pines and Central Africa, young men have journeyed 
painfully and strenuously to this far-famed centre 
of light in search of instruction. I smiled with 
gentle contempt upon the absurd assemblage. 
How superior I was to them — I, who had been 
brought up in a country where they knew what 
an education ought to be. 



ZCme anJ> ffalse B&ucatfon 85 

It is a good thing sometimes at moments of 
supreme complacency to examine into the facts 
upon which it is based. What was the history 
of my own school and college days ? Had I not 
spent the better part of nine years in studying 
two dead languages, which at the end of that period 
Lcould neither read nor write nor speak ? I began 
to have some misgivings, and to feel a certain degree 
of fellow-feeling for the groups of Koran-chanters. 
We were not so different after all, for the dead 
hand of monk and dervish lies still upon Occident 
and Orient alike. We were really all in the same 
boat, and the Universities of Berlin and Oxford 
and Chicago are none of them yet quite free 
from the superstitions of Damascus and Bag- 
dad. 

We owe the monstrous delusion that language 
forms the main part of education to the monastic 
students of the Middle Ages. All that was worth 
knowing was then contained in the Greek and 
Latin classics and Scriptures, and it was natural 
to confuse the medium of information with the 
learning itself. The Greek and Latin languages 
were then windows in the house of knowledge. 
Since that time all the treasures of that house 
have been brought out into the open air, but still 
many of us continue to climb through the windows, 
and in the operation we forget what we came for, 
lost in a sort of pseudo-science of window-climb- 
ing. 

The study of words is not education. It is the 
letter that killeth but the spirit giveth life, and 
it is the worship of the letter that deforms educa- 
tion east and west ; it is the dry-rot of the book 



86 Uolstcw as a Scboolmaster 

exalted above the thought and the thing. The 
monks of old, shut up in their libraries and far 
away from the real life of the times — well might 
they spend years in decorating parchment scrolls 
with their beautiful flourishes, but they are no 
guides for us to-day. 

A man may know many languages and yet not 
be educated. I used to live in Alexandria, the 
most polyglot city of the world, where every child 
born in the large foreign colony is heir to six or 
eight languages, for Arabic, French, Italian, Greek, 
English, German, Turkish, Armenian, Berberine, 
Spanish — all of these and others too — are in 
common use. And yet it is a city of little educa- 
tion, and few of these linguistic prodigies are 
well educated. I recall one acquaintance of mine, 
a foreign merchant, who was equally at home in 
half-a-dozen tongues, but whose horizon was 
strictly limited by his business and his daily news- 
paper. 

To know a foreign language is a desirable accom- 
plishment if we have occasion to use it, but it is 
not education. It comes rather under the head 
of valuable information. Just so it is useful to 
learn the names of the streets of the city in which 
we intend to live, but it is a waste of time to study 
a plan of St. Petersburg if we never intend to go 
there. Education begins at home. 

And we have an exaggerated idea too of the 
educational importance of our own language. 
When a boy in the spelling class says " d — e — d, 
dead," we correct him and make him insert an 
unnecessary (and really harmful) " a." It is 
plain that he was doing the sensible thing and that 



Urue an& jfalse Education 87 

we are teaching him a piece of unreason. Surely 
this cannot properly be called education. Our 
correction is absolutely arbitrary and answers to 
nothing in nature. And how we magnify the 
importance of grammar ! The real use of lan- 
guage is to convey our meaning, and the man who 
says " them things " conveys his quite as well 
as we who say " those things." Why, then, should 
we assume an air of superiority ? For all we 
know, a hundred years hence " them things " 
may be right and " those things " wrong ; for 
what is our language made of, if not of the mis- 
takes of our ancestors ? What is the main value 
of thorough drilling in spelling and grammar ? 
Why, when I meet a man who exhibits a know- 
ledge of the rules of prosody and orthography 
in his speech and writing, I say to myself, " My 
dear sir, you have been taught in the same way 
that I was taught ; we belong to the same 
fraternity." It is a kind of Masonic grip, that 
is all. 

I know a man who slips up frequently in con- 
versation, and who cannot write a page of a letter 
without making several mistakes, and yet he 
knows almost everything else under the sun. 
He can build a house, make a road, work a forge, 
and mend a mowing-machine ; he understands 
the care of horses and cattle, the qualities of 
different soils, the proper seasons for sowing and 
planting and reaping. He can cook his dinner and 
break a colt and manage men ; and I have often 
been tempted to say to him, " You are the educated 
man, and not I." It is true that I have resisted 
the temptation thus far and may eventually 



88 Uolstop as a Schoolmaster 

triumph over it, and yet if I did yield to it some 
day, would I not be coming pretty near the truth ? 
For I was educated upon the theory that I was a 
disembodied mind, and as a result I find it very 
difficult to this day even to sharpen a pencil. 
Count Tolstoy testifies even more radically to 
similar facts in Russia, for he says that there the 
best educated men often can neither read nor 
write. 

We have bodies as well as minds, and that is a 
great discovery for the educator to have made. 
Education must include the body, or it will be one- 
sided. In Germany the specialization of mind 
and body has gone farther perhaps than elsewhere, 
and there we have the ideal learned professor, with 
a huge bald forehead, great gold spectacles over 
his nearly blind eyes, and a slim, round-shouldered 
body which has almost atrophied from lack of 
fresh air and exercise. Go out from him into the 
fields and see the typical peasant, a giant in 
strength, but with a mind utterly undeveloped in 
the direction of book-learning. 

I remember as a boy visiting Oxford during the 
Franco-Prussian war and having the gardener of one 
of the colleges ask me if the war was in our neigh- 
bourhood ! And thus the beautiful walls of Christ 
Church and Magdalen dam up, as it were, the 
reservoirs of knowledge and prevent them from 
overflowing into the minds of the working people. 
A man has arms and legs as well as a brain, and 
he should learn to make use of all of them. What 
could be more absurd than the Indian clubs and 
dumb-bells and weights and pulleys^ which men 
have devised for the purpose of giving them that 



XTrue anfc f alse ECmcation *9 

physical exercise which they should have been 
taught to find in some useful occupation ? 

We need to produce all-round men and women, 
and the highest civilization is that which produces 
the greatest number of them. In our haste to 
manufacture " things/' we have forgotten the 
manufacture of men. We have " heads " over 
factories and " hands " to work in them, but the 
idea of combining head and hand in one individual 
is only just asserting itself. The principal product 
of a country is not its steel rails or its bicycles or 
its machinery, but its men and women, and our 
most important manufactories are the schools in 
which we undertake to shape them. Of all our 
" captains of industry/ ' the schoolmaster is the 
most essential to the true progress of the country. 

But there is one thing in the child more important 
than mind or body, and that is what we call 
character — the spiritual nature — the soul. A 
child's character is his attitude to his environ- 
ment, an attitude which may be masterful or 
servile, true or false, kindly or hateful. The first 
axiom for the teacher to assimilate is that there 
are natural elements at work in the child making 
for a good character. Give him a chance and he 
will show initiative, prefer the truth and exhibit 
affection for those about him. He must be en- 
couraged along these lines, and great care must be 
taken to throw no obstruction in his way. 

The deepest thing in character is love, for it is 
a pliant, suggestive, and yet overwhelming force, 
and in its self-forgetfulness leaves the way clear 
for all justice and righteousness. Children are 
affectionate by nature, and perhaps that is the 



90 n;olsto£ as a Scboolmaster 

quality contemplated by the saying, " Unless ye 
become as little children, ye cannot enter the 
kingdom of heaven/' It is not therefore necessary 
to teach love for neighbour positively, but to 
invite and cultivate it. In the old-fashioned 
school, with its hard and fast system and its dis- 
cipline, this would not be easy. Yet even here 
the teacher might begin to exercise the child in 
the class-room in loving the other children. On 
the first day, say, let each pupil begin with the 
child on his right, and on the next take in the one 
on his left, and then the one before and the one 
behind, until the circle of affection spread out and 
embraced the whole school, like the ripple from a 
falling stone on a pond. By the time it reached 
the walls of the school-house nothing could stop 
it, and it would take in the whole world before 
long, and it would prove as catching as the mumps 
or the measles. A good, manly, robust love is 
really the natural activity of human souls. 
-; Possibly the above method might be a difficult 
one to inaugurate, but surely the many writers 
upon pedagogy could invent a better way if they 
once applied their minds to it. The trouble is 
that they have never thought seriously of devel- 
oping the affections. The thing to avoid is the 
production of little prigs and hypocrites. And 
perhaps the best way to do this is not to have an 
old-fashioned school at all, but a new fashioned 
one in which not a word on the subject of love 
for neighbour should be uttered, but everything 
possible done " on the quiet " to kindle into a 
flame every spark of it which shows itself. And the 
beauty of this neighbour love is that it goes down 



XLtnc anb ffalse lE&ucation 91 

to the very root of all activities, and gives a 
motive for all the mental and physical and 
moral training that can be devised, for as soon 
as the individual begins to love he is seized by a 
strong desire to be useful to those whom he loves, 
and to look upon himself as an instrument for 
their welfare, and he will wish at once to make 
himself as perfect an instrument as he can. 

Here, then, is a good strong peg on which to hang 
all education, and the same studies which before 
were mere " accomplishments " and selfish indul- 
gences become miraculously transformed into 
subordinate parts of a coherent scheme of educa- 
tion, and the whole circle of " lessons " become 
related at the centre with the desire to serve 
humanity. Such a view of education puts every 
kind of knowledge in its place and gives a field 
of exercise to the natural exuberance of the child 
— to his sense of honesty, courage, truth, justice 
and all the other virtues. Without some such 
conception of education as this we might as well 
join the classes on the floor of the mosque of El 
Azhar and mumble gibberish for the rest of our 
lives and consider ourselves educated. 

It is encouraging to know that despite all 
temporary and local symptoms of reaction the 
general drift of the educational world is towards 
greater freedom. Schools are more efficient now 
without corporal punishment than they used to 
be with it. We are learning that we must sub- 
stitute nature's discipline for our own. The child 
should fear, not us, but the consequences of his 
acts. As Bolton Hall has well said in an un- 
published lecture, " Nature punishes. To punish 



92 Uolstos as a Schoolmaster 

a child is to teach it that when you are absent it 
can transgress nature's laws and go unpunished " ; 
and again, " Nature is a school, and when we 
punish we take the child away from nature's 
school." Punishment is an appeal to cowardice, 
to the beast in man. Let us rather appeal, says 
he, to the divinity in him. " It were as well to 
break a child's back as to break his will." And 
another objection to punishment is a practical 
one which I draw from my own experience, for 
I have never indulged in it without feeling that I 
was doing something worse, in punishing, than 
the original offence of the child. In the last 
analysis the reason that I punish the child is 
because I happen to be stronger than he is, and 
this is an irrational basis for justice. At any rate, 
let us try to avoid such arbitrary and faulty 
methods. Our best and most successful educators 
have long since discarded them, and the appeal 
to force shows only the weakness of the teacher. 

And new methods of instruction are making 
their way too. Read School and Society, by Pro- 
fessor John Dewey, of the University of Chicago, 
if you wish to learn what the next step in education 
will be. In his schools they do things together. 
They are social affairs. He shows clearly that 
the mere absorption of facts is an individual and 
selfish pursuit, and that marks and examinations 
give an artificial and anti-social competitive 
quality to education, so that it actually becomes a 
school crime for one child to help another, when 
such help should be recognised as a great virtue. 

Mr. Reeder, superintendent of the New York 
Orphan Asylum, too, condemns " institution- 



Ucue an& JFalse B&ucation 93 

alism." " Only life," he says, " rich, full, free, 
natural and individual, prepares for life. . . • 
The discipline that makes a good soldier or a good 
factory operative shrivels the life of a child," and 
he might have added " of a soldier and of a factory 
operative too." Everywhere we hear of the 
introduction of manual training and of the Kinder- 
garten system, and the influence of Pestalozzi and 
Froebel is slowly extending and improving upon 
itself. 

The educational world is to-day in a state of 
ferment, and hence the strong convictions of a 
man like Tolstoy are likely to impress themselves 
upon it ; and when he calls upon us to make the 
child his own chief teacher, we are bound to give 
ear and consider his advice. Teach the child 
when it wishes to learn, and do not (as Bolton Hall 
says we do) rebuke it for asking questions at one 
time — (" You will understand that later, my 
dear," or " Don't interrupt me ! ") — and then 
cram it with undesired information at another. 

It has often been noted that country-bred 
boys as a rule succeed better in life than city boys. 
Is it not because they are brought up in an at- 
mosphere of greater freedom ? It is from the 
determination of such questions as " Shall I 
climb the apple-tree or sail boats in the brook ? " 
that initiative and self-reliance spring, and the 
omnipresent nurse, governess and tutor are usually 
discouragers of originality, while the streets of a 
city offer little play for choice. The best en- 
vironment for a child, and hence the best school, 
is the one which presents the widest range of 
selection for his activities, and which leaves the 



94 Uolstos as a Scboolmaster 

choice as far as possible to him. Whenever the 
school of the future begins to realize this ideal, 
the happy children of that day and the well- 
rounded men and women, full of energy and 
readiness, who will grow up from them, will owe 
a debt of gratitude to Count Tolstoy, for he will 
surely have his high place among the pioneers of 
a freer and truer education. 



The End. 



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